From the course: Process Improvement Foundations

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Improving time performance: Bottlenecks

Improving time performance: Bottlenecks

From the course: Process Improvement Foundations

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Improving time performance: Bottlenecks

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- In the lunch line example in the previous section, we saw how the cashier was the bottleneck and that spotting that fact and then improving the cashier's throughput made all the difference. This idea of bottlenecks first appeared in the 1980s when a book called "The Goal" came out. It was written by Eli Goldratt and it blew everyone's minds, including mine. His first point is that you can't make more than the bottleneck can handle. So if you know the bottleneck, you know how much you can produce, whatever else is going on in your factory or office. And therefore, if you can increase the capacity of the bottleneck, you can increase the capacity of the whole system. So spending money on the bottleneck is really worth doing, while spending money on non-bottleneck areas is a complete waste. Lots of subtle ideas flow from this bottleneck idea, and here are three. Firstly, there's no point in pushing in more than the…

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