Tip for Project Managers and Production Managers

The production problem that Project Managers or Production Managers meet day by day. The problem is approximation of system performance and building schedules. 

The production systems usually contain dependent events and each event or production process has natural fluctuation of production.

For example we have production process built from 5 stages, which one detail or item has to pass full cycle stage by stage; in each stage can be handled between 2 and 6 details or items (occasionally depend of different non-predictable events, as practical Project Managers we meet during our work).

So the question is “How many cycles of production we need to produce 16 details?” The easiest answer is to calculate the average that is in our case is 4 and we get that we need 4 stages!

Let model the production process using the Excel random function:

*Stock – quantity of details came from previous stage but weren’t handled in current stage.

We can see that after 4 cycles we have only 14 details in this iteration.

Conclusions: If we have complicated production process we should avoid using averages and we should try model real production process according the minimum and maximum production in each stage. The most problematic processes - the processes contain low amount of cycles.

I hope it will be useful for you.

The principle of production system described in great novel “Goal” of Eliyahu M. Goldratt