Customer Reviews

Creating Level Pull: A Lean Production-System Improvement Guide for Production-Control, Operations, and Engineering Professionals (Lean Tool Kit)

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Every other lean management book encourages you to use "Value Stream Mapping" to improve your processes. The idea is that, having seen what is wrong with current processes, you will somehow "solve problems" and "improve the flow". In practice, unfortunately, it's rarely so simple. The real challenge of Value Stream Mapping is not just drawing the "actual state", but coming up with a robust "future state", and then to visualize it on the shop floor - which is a skill in itself. And in fact, there is very little published about it, apart from this remarkable workbook.

As a lean consultant, helping clients to come up with a transformed process and to put on paper an "ideal state" has been a recurring stumbling block, if only because there are so many new things to explain: leveling, kanban, material handling - all at once! This workbook has helped me immensely because I now get clients to work through it step by step to clarify and share their understanding. It's both general in its scope and explanations, and very specific in how to attack the problem. Indeed, it's one of the very few lean books that gets into the real nitty-gritty of how to redesign a flow beyond telling you to "just do it".

I can't recommend Creating Level Pull strongly enough to all those who try to really implement lean (as opposed to just talk about it). This is it: this is where lean really happens: capability vs demand, creating the pacemaker, controlling production. I'm really impressed with it because it explains clearly and simply some tricky and counter-intuitive lean mechanisms, which are at the core of just-in-time. Definitely a key to successful lean implementations.

I liked this workbook from the folks at LEI a lot. I have gotten lots of use out of Learning to See over the years and finally they have published a worthy follow up book that expands my thinking. This book provides a ton of meaty advice about the creation of a complete pull system for a typical discrete parts plant. Like the other stuff these guys write it is in the form of a case study answering sequential questions that unfold as you progress through the text.

The Pro's: 1) This format really helped me stay focused on the topic by providing a single complete end to end example. 2) The graphics and examples are very clear, 3) the 12 questions seem logical and complete, 4) the formulas are overall thinking are simple and logical, 5) It moves beyond a simple value stream with only one product The Con's: 1) I only have one really and it is true of all LEI stuff - I would like to see different examples from a variety of industries. Specifically some low volume high variation, more build to order stuff, and job shop or off the wall examples would help out a lot of us with diverse situations. (Maybe too much to ask for in one book). Overall though this is a minor detraction and it is a great learning aid. I can see using this a lot to lead some of the plants I am in charge of improving by expanding their pull systems in a step by step manner.

Creating Level Pull is an excellent book written for amatuer as well as professional lean deployers. Highly recommended inspite of its price.

Purchased book(s) for manufacturing company: COO, Director of Manufacturing, and VP of Engineering. They have found it helpful.

Very Easy to understad all concepts.

key when you need to develop a pull system