Competitive pressures are forcing manufacturing companies to find new ways to provide a wide variety of products at reduced costs. Pull type material control strategies that make efficient use of available production capacities and optimize inventories could be very useful in improving factory operations. However, there is aneed for analytical tools that precisely model the operating characteristics of multi-product pull systems. Such models should not only provide reasonably accurate performance estimates butalso be amenable to rapid analysis of performance tradeoffs. This book presents an...