Frescura and the Pull System for managing production
For us, using the Pull System has meant, above all, having in real time a tried and tested method of managing key information from the production departments, called “production status”, but fundamentally it has meant adding consistency to the application of the key principle of Company Wide Quality Control, the DRW system, which examines, manages and controls the activities that are the basis for the internal customer-supplier relationship. This relationship exists in every company process, where the downstream department, the downstream work centre and the downstream worker are considered the “customer” and the upstream department, the upstream work centre and the upstream worker are the “supplier”. In this reading system, obviously, the concept of “revolving” where a work centre which is solely customer or solely supplier cannot exist; each centre is considered a customer when it receives the “semi-finished product” from its upstream supplier, and is then considered a supplier when, after having added value (work) to the semi-finished product it received, he sends it in turn to another “customer” downstream, and so on. Therefore, with TPS, our production system must always satisfy the orders of internal customers, dominated by the main order which is the one coming from the external customer.  This is why the system is said to be “pulled” by the requirements of the customer (both internal and end) rather than the old system where orders were “pushed” by warehouse requirements.
We focused the necessary transition to arrive at this “perfection” on a new external customer-supplier relationship where we specified, unquestioningly, the responsibilities of the two roles:

1. the customer (Frescura) must be able to request the material it requires in order to satisfy the demands of those who are downstream of it (end customer), without resorting to forecasting, but almost in real time (and here we approach the concept of the just in time supplies);
2. the supplier must organise its stock so as to satisfy the demands of the customer, Frescura. In the colourful terminology of the Toyota Product System, this backup stock is called the “supermarket”.

Now that this level of organisational innovation has come to Frescura, we have accepted that the new production system is based on two basic assumptions:

1. the production plan constantly changes;
2. production is never implemented according to the plan.

We used these two assumptions as the basis for bringing innovation to our current system of planning production and achieving the goal we had set ourselves: 100% service level.
 
The service level
The 100% service level is one of the most ambitious objectives for any company. This factor defines the existing ratio between perfect consistency that must be present between the order being shipped and the same order when it entered the company, guaranteeing the precise shipping time required by the customer. For example, an 80% service level means that 20% of the products requested by the customer are “stranded” and are not shipped to the customer because they were not produced in time for shipment. By introducing the revolutionary Toyota Production System and all the methodologies that make reference to it, we can, with true pride, guarantee our customers always receive a 100% service level in a very short shipping time.