Implementing Pull Manufacturing in Make-To-Order Environments Mohammed ALMANEI, Omogbai OLEGHE, Mohamed AFY-SHARARAH and Konstantinos SALONITIS 1 School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University, Cranfield MK43 0AL, UK Abstract. The demand for increasing product variety and customization has forced many companies to adopt a make-to-order (MTO) strategy. Traditional push-type MTO companies suffer from unstable demands, struggling to deliver on time, making them consider the utilization of pull systems to control production. In the present paper, an overview of pull systems in MTO environments is presented. Moreover, a discrete event simulation (DES) model of an MTO company in the printing and packaging industrial sector was developed and validated, in order to identify areas for improvement. DES was also used in order to evaluate the feasibility of implementing three types of pull systems: kanban, CONstant-Work- In-Process (CONWIP) and Paired Overlapping Loops of Cards with Authorizations (POLCA). The main performance indicators measured were the average WIP and the average throughput time of parts. The key findings of this project for the case study were: a) kanban is inapplicable for the current routing of parts; b) a CONWIP strategy improves the shop floor performance, but only when extra capacity is added to the extrusion workstation; c) production based on POLCA leads to the blockage of the system due to the existence of multi-routes and undirected routing. Keywords. Lean Manufacturing, Discrete event simulation, Make-to-order. 1. Introduction Lean Manufacturing is well established in the manufacturing sector as a philosophy focused on reducing all types of waste, which consequently improves quality and reduces production time and cost. The ultimate objective of lean is to achieve a continuous flow [1]. Continuous workflow reduces many kinds of production waste, for example, product waiting times, and increases value to the customer. Practice has shown that lean is easily adapted to make-to-stock organizations where the production demand can be predicted quite accurately. However, the increasing demand for high mix and low volume products has forced many companies to adopt the make-to-order (MTO) approach [2]. Such companies must cope with unstable customer demand and their main challenge is to meet such demand on time. It has been shown that high mix and low volume producers find it difficult to adopt lean strategies, such as Kanban and one-piece flow effectively [3] and have to rely on more traditional practices based on push-type production systems and functional layouts and implementation of simple Material Resource Planning (MRP) [4]. However, implementing pull production helps keep under control inventory as well as controlling throughput times by establishing a work in progress (WIP) cap [5], [6]. Nowadays companies are fortunate to be able to opt from many different pull systems, Advances in Manufacturing Technology XXXV M. Shafik and K. Case (Eds.) © 2022 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/ATDE220613 334