If you’re serious about Lean, consider signing up for the weekly blog by Christoph Roser by going here (The subscription form is at the top of the right sidebar).

I don’t often recommend other bloggers, but I think you may find Dr. Roser helpful. He’s been actively studying production systems since 1998. He worked at Toyota for several years and has been a lean consultant and college professor (in Germany) for years. I have his book, “All About Pull Production,” which is excellent. I regularly read his blog. Two recent posts especially got my attention:

This one is about efficiency:
https://www.allaboutlean.com/effects-on-efficiency-group-size-line-location-product/

This one is his summary of the benefits of Team / Team-Leader structure:
https://www.allaboutlean.com/toyota-team-structure/

Roser’s post on Team structure includes his analysis of data on team-size and productivity. He thinks smaller is better!

Since this is supposed to be the “Juicy Quote” blog, here a quote defining “Pull” from Dr. Roser’s book All About Pull Production (AllAboutLean.com, 2021) p. 13.

Pull in its essence is a structured way to manage your material flow. You have an inventory limit. Whenever an item or job leaves the system, the system automatically take actions either to replace this item (if it is make-to-stock) or to start the next job (if it is make-to-order). Hence, this limit on the inventory controls the start of production of additional parts or jobs and prevents the overloading of the system as well as accidental underutilization of the system.”

One final note: the book All About Pull Production has the most detail explanation of Kanban and how to properly calculate quantities that I have seen anywhere.