Pull systems with advance demand information

This paper investigates the benefits of integrating advance demand information (ADI) with pull-kanban type production and inventory control systems (PICS). Since efficient analytical models for performance evaluation studies of these systems are unavailable, we use simulation experiments for the study. In particular, we investigate the impact of several PICS design parameters such as kanban card limits, target finished goods inventory levels, amount of demand information available, and the quality of ADI on performance measures such as system throughput, inventory holding costs and customer service levels. Our study shows that in many situations, integrating ADI with pull systems provides opportunities for efficiencies that might be significantly greater that that available using pull systems alone. Further more, we show that the performance of systems operating under pull-type PICS with ADI could be fairly robust to the quality of information being shared.