From the course: Process Improvement Foundations

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Improving time performance: Queues

Improving time performance: Queues

From the course: Process Improvement Foundations

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Improving time performance: Queues

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- We've seen that queues are the main cause of long lead time and that they will build up in front of the bottleneck, so you need to address that. But what about when you have enough capacity? What happens then? Here's an example. Clearly, if you can serve 10 people in an hour and you've got 12 people an hour arriving, then the queue is going to get longer and longer by an average of two people per hour. After 20 hours, the queue will be 40 people and you don't want that. But what if you can serve 10 people in an hour and you only have eight people arriving? Surely that's going to be fine, isn't it? I want to show you that actually it isn't. Well, this is because the eight people won't arrive evenly spaced. So you'll get several at once, which is a queue, and then you'll have a gap. And during this gap, after you've got rid of the queue, you're not serving anyone, so you're losing capacity, and your ability to serve…

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