Influence of Bottleneck on Productivity of Production Processes Controlled by Different Pull Control Mechanisms

The goal of any lean implementation in production process is achieving better production performances and one of them is productivity. Among many lean principles, pull principle is the most complex to achieve. There are different production control mechanisms for achieving pull and making decision which one to apply can be demanding because sometimes it is not obvious which is the best for specific situation. Many different production parameters influence production process and for one production setting, one control mechanism is the best choice, but for another production setting it might not be. One goal of this study was to research the influence of bottleneck in the production process in regard to achieving better productivity by applying pull principle. Some of the literature considered deals with the topic of bottleneck and pull but focuses only on bottleneck or in addition on one another production parameter and most of the literature studies up to three different pull control mechanisms. One of the objectives of this study was also to fill the research gap in a way to investigate more mechanisms, particularly, according to the literature, those most widely used in various production conditions with emphasis on bottleneck. The advantage of this research is that in addition to the bottleneck, other parameters, namely the number of control cards, variations and processing time are considered. For that reason, simulation experimentation was conducted and as a result regression functions modelling the relationship between productivity and mentioned parameters for four different pull control mechanisms are gained. The analysis showed that the existence of a bottleneck affects the effectiveness of pull mechanisms in terms of productivity.