Push and Pull Production Systems: Issues and Comparisons

TLDR

Concerns about American manufacturing competitiveness have spurred renewed interest in alternative production control strategies. The study investigates why pull systems appear to outperform push systems by examining conjectures about congestion, control ease, and the role of bounded WIP. The authors analyze these conjectures using analytically tractable models. The analysis confirms the conjectures and identifies a hybrid push‑pull strategy that outperforms pure push and pull systems and is more broadly applicable than traditional pull systems such as Kanban.

Abstract

Concerns about American manufacturing competitiveness compel new interest in alternative production control strategies. In this paper, we examine the behavior of push and pull production systems in an attempt to explain the apparent superior performance of pull systems. We consider three conjectures: that pull systems have less congestion; that pull systems are inherently easier to control; and that the benefits of a pull environment owe more to the fact that WIP is bounded than to the practice of “pulling” everywhere. We examine these conjectures for analytically tractable models. In doing so, we not only find supporting evidence for our surmises but also identify a control strategy that has push and pull characteristics and appears to outperform both pure push and pure pull systems. This hybrid system also appears to be more general in its applicability than traditional pull systems such as Kanban.