From the course: Process Improvement Foundations

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Challenge: Balancing lines and flow

Challenge: Balancing lines and flow

From the course: Process Improvement Foundations

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Challenge: Balancing lines and flow

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- Imagine this is how you get your lunch in the office dining room. Someone serves you your soup, which takes 20 seconds, then you move along to the meat counter, where it takes them 3 seconds to cut you off a nice piece, and then it takes 20 seconds to get your vegetables, and then 15 and 10 seconds for one server to give you both your dessert and your drink, and then it takes a minute to pay for it all. Have a look at the diagram for a moment, and then see if you can tell me, how many lunches this setup can serve per hour? Now people often find this a difficult question, and they get bogged down with a calculator working out lots of sums, but actually, this question illustrates a really important and simple idea. What's the bottleneck of the system? The cashier is the slowest part, and can only process 60 people per hour. So whatever the others do, that's the number of people you're going to be able to serve. It's…

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