when your customer's engineering team becomes an unpaid extension of yours, forever.
means the deep technical and process linkage between a business and its customer's systems, workflows, or teams, so deep that switching suppliers means rebuilding half the plumbing.
from grew out of 1980s just-in-time manufacturing, where suppliers wired their inventory systems directly into automakers like toyota so parts arrived exactly when needed, no warehouse required.
edi in retail — walmart forced suppliers onto electronic data interchange since 1990s
salesforce apex — custom code makes migrating off salesforce brutally expensive
aws private apis — amazon builds bespoke integrations for netflix-scale customers
toyota kanban — suppliers plugged into toyota's just-in-time system since 1970s