Assessment of the Influence of Just in Time (JIT) delivery of Materials in Managing Cost Levels in the Pharmaceutical Industry in Kenya

This article assesses the influence of Just in time (JIT) delivery of materials in managing cost levels in the pharmaceutical industry in Kenya. Non - probability sampling technique under the category of purposive sampling was used. The population of interest was composed of twenty three pharmaceutical manufacturing firms located in Nairobi, registered in the Kenya Fact book 16th Edition, 2001 & The Kenya Telephone Directory 2004 and nine pharmaceutical companies , 23 employees in manufacturing, finance, procurement, warehousing were selected out of the target population of 28. The research instrument was a questionnaire. Analysis of the data was done using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .The study affirmed by 63.2% that JIT production strategy and 62.4% respondents affirmed that JIT vendor strategy had a statistically significant association with the cost level management hence the relationship between the variables was not due to chance. The study recommends that pharmaceutical companies in Kenya should fully adopt lean manufacturing in order to manage its cost levels hence give the firm a competitive advantage.