Bottleneck Quotes
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The new orders have changed the balance. We took more orders, which by themselves didn’t turn any resource into a new bottleneck, but they did drastically reduce the amount of spare capacity on the non-bottlenecks, and we didn’t compensate with increased inventory in front of the bottleneck.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
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What we had been doing many times was turning a nonbottleneck into a temporary bottleneck. This was forcing other work centers downstream from it to be idle, which reflected poorly on efficiencies. Now, even though we’ve recognized that non-bottlenecks have to be idle periodically, there is actually less idle time than before. Since we cut batch sizes, work is flowing through the plant more smoothly than ever. And it’s weird, but the idle time we do have is less noticeable. It’s spread out in shorter segments. Instead of people hanging around with nothing to do for a couple of hours, now they’ll have maybe a few tento twenty-minute waits through the day for the same volume of work. From everybody’s standpoint, that’s much better.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt