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Benchmark Six Sigma Expert View by Venugopal R One of the key sayings that most of us would have heard while talking about Consumer Orientation is “Shed Product-Out philosophy” and “Adopt Market-In philosophy”. We come across numerous explanations about the “Push” and “Pull” strategies. I am sure that most of the excellence ambassadors will do a good job of explaining these flow systems with examples. Let me try to express my views briefly based on my experiences. An auto components company who have ‘Original Equipment’ manufacturers as their clients, has to align its production flow based on the clear orders from clients. This, of course is the case when your brand is already established and you are one of the ‘approved’ suppliers for the client. Evidently it is more of ‘pull’ strategy. Imagine that you are a new entrant to the market or you are working to obtain orders from a new customer. The ‘Push’ is needed to sell your brand and credibility and also hasten to provide a pro-active pilot sample to attract the customer’s attention positively. You may want your product to be tried out and to obtain specific feedback based on the client’s expectations and accordingly customize the product. For the same company, the products may be sold for ‘replacement’ in the open market. Imagine it is a fast-consuming product like tires, batteries or brake pads. Such products need to find their place in the shelves of the dealers for ready availability. The customers usually require such products immediately and they are not going to place an order for them and wait! The brand awareness creation, product promotion and product availability are critical here. Now this will appear to encourage a ‘push’ system in the flow. However, it could be a combination of ‘push’ and ‘pull’. The ‘pull’ for the organization could be based on data about market behavior, the consumption patterns, and the re-order levels from dealers. Let’s look at a banking scenario. The dynamics could be bit different for issues like inventory, storage, WIP etc. If a bank wants to attract more customers, they should not only have their ‘products’ ready, but also invest in adequate campaigning and promotion programs to draw customers. If you do the ‘concept’ selling for a product, but fail to make the product available before your competition does, you are actually creating more customers for your competition! You would have experienced every time you talk to the call center of your bank for any purpose, after attending to your query, they are quite likely to make you feel important and tell you that ‘you have been identified as one of our elite customers and we have a special offer for you’. And it will usually be an offer for providing you a loan or a credit card! Obviously, they have a target to ‘push’ a product! Even the bank is going to cut your card, only after you submit your application, which happens to be a ‘pull’ trigger here! Which is better – Push or Pull? Looks like both have their merits depending upon the situation and other conditions, and maybe sometimes they appear to co-exist. Some of the senior members in the forum may recall around 3 decades ago, how we had to place an order and wait for several months for buying a vehicle or to get a telephone connection. We see how all this is transformed in today’s world. How do we relate this to Push / Pull strategy and why? I leave it to be given some thought!

The best answer has been provided by Vastupal. He has explained the three systems along with reasons why one should be preferred over another.