2 Use the ‘Pyramid of key factors that underpin JIT’ to describe the factors that caused these actions to affect the company’s ability to respond to the demands being placed on it by customers. This is the case of Smog Co., a small supplier of well-engineered components. Smog produces a range of products grouped into families. Production of one of the highervolume product families has been organised into a flow process made up of four steps, which follow one after the other in sequence. Changeover from one product to another is relatively simple, but takes around 10 minutes per machine. To minimise delays caused by changeovers, products tend to be made in batches. These batches move from one step to the next, where they queue on a first in, first out basis to be worked on, after which they move to the next step. This process is shown in Figure 6.6.