It sounds like your son might not have the time, energy, or desire to actually read The Goal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) http://en.wikipedia

It sounds like your son might not have the time, energy, or desire to actually read The Goal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) ... although I could perhaps have read that book when I was twelve or thirteen -- it is highly approachable, perhaps even by a child; if you can solve logic puzzles you can read this book -- and if I had I would have really understood modern manufacturing. This is the book that my buddy the fab manager has on his shelf. There is a chapter of The Goal in which the protagonist literally learns about how manufacturing works by helping a Scout troop of 12-year-olds move faster on their cross-country hike. You need to go to the library and read just that chapter. Then maybe have your son read it. If you want a detailed summary of what the book is about I can't do better than Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints (though that is way less readable than Goldratt's book) and if you want a summary of the summary it would go something like this: Modern manufacturing is closer to your "pull" description than to "push". Everyone hates inventory of finished goods, and they hate inventory of half-finished goods even more. So the goal is to make stuff only as fast as it is being sold. You control how fast you make stuff by controlling how much material you put into the factory at step zero. And you decide that by measuring every step in the process and figuring out the slowest step. The slowest step is the constraint. In your example, it's Employee 2. Because Employee 2 can only make 40 widgets per day, your factory can only make 40 widgets per day. This leads to a bunch of important management facts: A) To avoid having half-finished inventory piling up on the assembly line, don't start more than 40 widgets' worth of work in a day. Anything extra will be wasted anyway. Have Employee 1 only work half the time. Or, equivalently, give Employee 1 only 40 widgets' worth of raw material each day. (In the real world, of course, every step has less than 100% yield, so maybe you start 50 widgets in order to end up with 40 widgets entering step two.) B) If you need more widgets per day, you need not upgrade everything in the factory. You need only upgrade Employee 2. Hire Employees 2b and 2c and 2d. Or: Notice that Employee 1 is now only working half the time. Perhaps if Employee 1 was less efficient, but in a particular way that made Employee 2 more efficient, it would speed up Employee 2, which would speed up the whole factory. Have Employee 1 work part time cranking out her 40-or-so widgets and spend the rest of her time fetching coffee and tools for Employee 2. C) Eventually you will find that you've upgraded Employee 2 to the point that he is no longer the constraint. The constraint will move. Maybe it will now be Employee 1. If so, get to work upgrading Employee 1, or making her job go faster. Or maybe you've moved the constraint completely out of the factory: You can now make more parts than your salespeople can sell and the constraint is the marketplace, in which case you need to make some commercials and attend more trade shows.