The push approach is a common way for processes to be managed, and often seems a sensible option. If some of the people in a factory or an office are idle, it seems a good idea to give them work to do. The assumption is that those prod-ucts can be sold at some point in the future. A similar assumption is that build-ing up a stock of finished goods will quickly help to satisfy the customer. This argument seems particularly attractive where manufacturing lead times are long, if quality is a problem, or if machines often break down. It is better and safer to make products, just in case there is a problem in the future. Unfortunately, this argument has severe limitations. Push scheduling and its associated inventories do not always help companies to be more responsive. All too often, the very products the organisation wants to sell are unavailable, while there is too much stock of products that are not selling. And building up stock certainly does not help to make more productive use of spare capacity. Instead it can easily lead to excess costs, and hide opportunities to improve processes.