From the course: Constraint and Bottleneck Management
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Finding constraints and bottlenecks by observation
From the course: Constraint and Bottleneck Management
Finding constraints and bottlenecks by observation
- Studying individual processes and mapping the system in a process map is necessary to properly identify the constraint, the system's theoretical capacity, and what other processes are also close to becoming a constraint and may therefore also require attention soon. However, we might be able to get some early insight by just looking at what's going on. When operations are stressed, deliveries are falling behind, it's easy to say everything's a bottleneck. Well, actually, by the theory of constraints definition, everything can be a bottleneck if every single process has less capacity than market demand. But that's extraordinarily rare, and there is still certainly only one or a couple of constraints. But let's consider what clues we might get from just observing what is happening on the shop floor as the manufacturing expression goes. What might we see, experience from working in the operations that might give us a clue to where the constraint is? When processes are not coupled…
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