It has been argued in the Production Planning and Control literature that "pull" (or Just-in-Time type systems) are not suitable for operation in environments where demand is unstable or volatile. Has anybody been involved with supply chain instability studies in this area? Or can anyone point me to previous related studies?
I have screened through past e-mails exchanged in this listserv and it indicates that discussions around this topic did not take place.
I am a Ph.D. student working on investigating the impacts of "flexible kanban systems" on the on-time-delivery performance of pull systems from a System Dynamics modeling and simulation point of view. In this case, a flexible kanban system differs from a "traditional kanban system" (as originally proposed at Toyota) in the sense that the number of kanban cards regulating the levels of work in process inventory is allowed to change over time during production cycles. "Traditional" pull systems using kanbans tend to keep the number of cards constant during production cycles and only change their number in the event of major changes in production capacity.
Thanks you for your attention! Sincerely, George ___________________________________________________________ George W. L. Sousa, Ph.D. Candidate & Graduate Research Assistant Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Enterprise Engineering Research Lab 302B Whittemore Hall, Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061-0118 USA phone: +1(540)231-6920 email: gsousa@vt.edu http://www.ise.vt.edu/eerl_lab.htm
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