- no work: if the bottleneck has no work, it can’t put things through; since the system’s throughput is determined by bottleneck’s it drops
- missing parts: the bottleneck can start work but needs to interrupt work due to missing parts; it needs to touch this work order more times than required; this leaves it with less time to actually work on orders, hence system’s throughput drops
- multitasking: similar effect and very popular in knowledge work: the bottleneck switches between multiple work packages; it’s net productive capacity and therefore system throughput drop
- working on wrong material: if we need rectangular shaped figures but the bottleneck is busy with a circular one, it’s overactivated; in production prevalent where batches of different product variants exceed actual demand; variant: working on defect material
- all negative combined: of course the preceding list entails each dynamic in isolation; in the field we find some combination of them, therefore depending on their prevalence we have a combined drop in throughput
- ideal: ideally the bottleneck is never starved of non-defective work, only full-kits (no missing parts) that is actually driven by demand, no multitasking
- potential: the potential is the multiple between the previous reduced throughput and the full utilisation of the bottleneck’s capacity
- utilisation: actually using capacity for real demand without wasting it
- overactivation: using capacity but not for current demand (we might consider to include wasted capacity for unnecessary switching here)
Perform a quick self-check of your department’s state of work flow (project organisation or engineer-to-order) => Register for the Dolphin Study: https://dolphinstudy.info
- Determine the root causes of your current (reduced) work flow level and
- a first indication of the potential of what’s possible with your current resources (with less stress btw).
You’ll get a benchmark against other participants. And it’s free.
