Principles of the pull system in production logistics

Modern production (if the appropriate conditions have been created for it) focuses on implementing the principles of pulling material flows. However, this often requires radical changes in procurement processes, production management, and customer delivery management.

Push production principles are characterized by the fact that there are more points (machines or technologies) in the production process that must be managed centrally. In contrast, a pull system aims to minimize the number of such points (ideally, there would be only one such point), while the remaining elements of the logistics chain are managed in a decentralized manner, based on information coming from that point. This means that production planning is oriented towards one process, and the remaining processes are controlled by the needs (orders) defined in that single process. Current pull systems also have many weaknesses. Based on experience from production practice, they can be defined as follows:

• misunderstanding of the basic conditions for implementing a pull system by the implementation team and company management,
• insufficient identification and failure to meet the basic conditions for implementing a pull system,
• low level of the management visualization system,
• lack of a data collection system and overly complex procedures for recording and processing data,
• lack of a methodology for assessing the status of the pull system.

A representative of pull systems is the production management system – Kanban, which is described in more detail later in the article. (…)

Principles of the pull system in production logistics – PDF file for download