Why does speeding up one job sometimes change nothing?
Imagine a kit passing through several stages before it is finished. If one required stage has less capacity than the others, making a faster stage even faster may not increase the number of completed kits. That limiting stage is a bottleneck, though demand, shared resources, and changing conditions can complicate a real process.
Questions you could explore
- How could an improvement move the bottleneck somewhere else?
Start reading
- eCampusOntario Pressbooks-hosted open textbookFundamentals of Operations Management, 4.9 The Bottleneck Phenomenon and Its Impact on Process Capacity
The operations-management chapter explains bottlenecks through a worked manufacturing example. Its simple capacity model is not a full factory forecast.
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