Yes, but also no. Prediction implies somewhat steady flow. That is of course the ideal! If you know roughly how much is going to be needed when you can just run things to schedule and you don't need any signals at all!
The problematic case is when variation is too big for that. That's when (from my memory -- was a while since I read the books) Goldratt leans on global ingress control instead of local signaling.
But I do realise I may be misremembering. I should probably re-read some time soon.
I read it more recently than you and your memory matches mine. I was always surprised The Goal taught a push-based method rather than a pull-based one.
What I learned from "The Goal" is that any business/system will always have a single bottleneck that dictates the max throughput of the whole business/system.
So as a manager it is your #1 objective to find that bottleneck and remove it. And the moment you remove it, the max throughput of the whole business/system improves until some other bottleneck is now limiting throughput. So you repeat finding and fixing that bottleneck etc.
There are of course different ways to fix the bottleneck. Kanban is a famous example of one. However even with Kanban the business will still have a bottleneck that limits throughput.
Got you. It seems like I'm the one misremembering. I thought they'd gotten more sophisticated than that by the end. I guess the story makes the ideas seem more powerful than they'd appear when laid out in a straight-forward way against competing processes.
The problematic case is when variation is too big for that. That's when (from my memory -- was a while since I read the books) Goldratt leans on global ingress control instead of local signaling.
But I do realise I may be misremembering. I should probably re-read some time soon.