6/26

I'm in Memphis. Today I visited a replica of the original 1916 Piggly Wiggly store hosted by the Pink Palace Museum (shown above).  This is arguably the earliest commercially successful implementation of supply chain pull and the precursor of Just-in-Time.

I had studied the original diagrams and patent for the store, but I had not noticed before how thin Clarence Saunders had designed and built his shelves.  Each shelf has sufficient depth for one large can-good, which further emphasizes how each purchase would send an urgent signal up the chain -- and it was a chain back then -- regarding customer choice.

In 1956 Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota engineer, visited a Piggly Wiggly and was inspired to reconfigure how automobiles were manufactured.

Ohno perceived that as pull signals travel toward sources of supply they can facilitate a tight focus on what is being consumed: what is really needed. This can – if recognized – be used to eliminate waste and costs related to Just-in-Case hoarding of resources and over-production.

Organizing production to reflect consumer “pull”, rather than the “push” of historical patterns or guesses about the future was a revolutionary shift. Especially when the signals are treated as measures and the measures are consistently applied to manage production (and distribution and more), a very different relationship emerges between sources of demand and sources of supply.