What fascinates me is that one can change the utilisation of any component in a system but one will not increase its overall throughput unless you first utilise the bottleneck's fully, reduce the capacity consumption of flow-items or extend it's capacity. Then the bottleneck moves and one is required to spot it anew as the cybernetic point of the system again.
Recently, I've appreciated the notion that any flow-item usually takes most of it's time within queues of a system (which we don't consider as queues). So, instead of minimising flow-time by better managing queues is to eliminate them whereever one can. Finally, ensuring that all handovers contain all parts (full-kit) allowing the next step to complete.
Remarkably this rather counterintuitive concept - despite its high leverage - is widely unknown in practice, but also its value might be tricky to tap.
Effects of using TOC methodology:
- increase system throughput without any wasted investment
- decrease cost of working capital
- decrease flow time (may be time to market for projects)
I can support you in:
- identifying external and internal constraints
- ensure that the capacity of your constraint is used all the time
- utilize your constraint completely by offloading non-constraint work (through re-defining component boundaries)
- extending the constraints throughput (by not changing & changing its capacity)
- shift your business to cover the constraint in the sector's supply chain