Just-in-time inventory management — minimizing stock on hand, timing deliveries closely to actual demand — was the dominant model for decades before 2020, prized for the capital-efficiency of not tying up cash in warehouse inventory. The supply disruptions of 2020–2022 pushed a broad shift toward "just-in-case" buffer stock strategies, as importers who ran lean inventory models found themselves with empty shelves when shipping disruption hit.
Since then, the pendulum has swung back somewhat as interest rates and carrying costs made excess inventory more expensive to hold, pushing many importers toward a middle position — holding more buffer stock than pre-2020 norms, but not at the peak levels adopted during the most acute disruption years, essentially a risk-adjusted compromise between the two extremes.
Where an importer lands on this spectrum has a direct effect on shipping strategy: a buffer-stock approach favors booking further ahead and using bonded storage (discussed in our free trade zone guide) to manage the carrying-cost penalty, while a leaner approach puts more weight on reliable, predictable transit times and leaves less room for the kind of booking delay or rolled cargo discussed elsewhere in this series.
We work with clients across this spectrum — the booking cadence and buffer planning we recommend differs depending on where a client sits between just-in-time and just-in-case, and is worth an explicit conversation rather than assumed from how a previous shipment was planned.