Improvement Insights Blog

Here’s the craziest Lean Pull System explanation I’ve ever seen, but it stuck with me:

“A long time ago I was introduced to Lean. We asked the consultants that were helping us with it, “What’s Lean, and what’s a Pull System” and they surprised us all because they started undoing their belts like this.

“They pulled [the belts] out and they said, “If you have a system and you try and push product through it, guess what? You get slack in the middle.” Does this make sense? You get all this work in process and everything else piling up. If you make one end faster the other ends aren’t keeping up. If you do a pull system, you’re pulling things through your process.

“So imagine if you’re a hospital and you try to speed up the emergency department… guess what? The nursing units can’t keep up. If you speed up the nursing units, then you probably can’t get discharges done. So if you’re going to do this you have to accelerate discharges, nursing units and emergency room performance all at the same time so you sustain this pull system.

“Anyway, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified,” “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and QI Macros [software]. That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s get those pull systems smoothed out. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”