Now we get to a tricky part...implementing pull systems.

By the way, that's what we're going to call it...Pull Systems.  NOT kanban.

Nobody actually knows what the hell a kanban is.  Your associates and operators won't know what it is even after you've explained it.  All the talk you'll do of kanban cards and kanban bins will just confuse them.  Kanban is just jargon used by folks who want to make all this lean stuff seem mysterious.

Why is implementing pull tricky?  Well, you can't just do pull like you can (for the most part) just do 5S, Quick Change, or VSM.  Mind you, just doing any of these doesn't mean you'll be effective or successful, but it is possible to do a one-shot, one-time,
short-on-results effort at any of them.  That's not possible with pull systems.  It takes a good bit of time and study to implement even limited pull.

It's not every manufacturer that badly needs to implement pull.  I've worked in several settings in which raw material went into one end of the machine, a finished product came out the other end.  It was packaged, taken to shipping, and put on a truck.  And that's before we got started on our lean implementation. 

In other cases, the finished product was packaged and taken to a warehouse.  Our "pull implementation" consisted of a leadership directive to have only a certain amount of inventory on hand, e.g. one month rather than six months.  Not much else needed to be done.

Pull systems are most useful (and most challenging to implement) where products have lots of parts and pieces coming from lots of different places.  Each part and piece has its own lead time.  Parts and pieces get made into sub-assemblies that get made into other sub-assemblies that get put together into a finished product.  Every one of those parts and pieces and sub-assemblies needs to get where it's needed in the right quantity, at the right time, with near perfect quality or the whole system comes crashing down and gets tossed aside for the old way of doing things.  All of which is to say...if you haven't done a good job on 5S, Quick Change, Work Standardization, preventive maintenance, and scrap reduction, don't even THINK of trying to implement pull systems.