3 ms·
This problem actually comes up in The Goal. After the characters lift the bottlenecks in their factory, things go smoothly for a while but then they start to se
by steppi 4y ago
This problem actually comes up in The Goal. After the characters lift the bottlenecks in their factory, things go smoothly for a while but then they start to see starvation in other areas like you mentioned. The solution they come up with involves local signaling and also data collection and analysis to understand the timeframes in play within the factory. The following excerpt is from Chapter 26.
Then I said, "Fine, but how do we time each release of material so it arrives at the bottleneck when it's needed?" Stacey said, "I'm not sure, but I see what you're worried about. We don't want the opposite problem of no work in front of the bottleneck." "Hell, we got at least a month before that happens, even if
we released no more red tags from today on," said Bob. "But I know what you mean. If we idle the bottleneck, we lose throughput."
"What we need," I said, "is some kind of signal to link the bottlenecks with the release-of-materials schedule." Then Ralph, to my surprise, spoke up and said "Excuse me, this is just a thought. But maybe we can predict when to release
material by some kind of system based on the data we've kept on both the bottlenecks."
- kqr 4y agoYes, but also no. Prediction implies somewhat steady flow. That is of course the ideal! If you know roughly how much is going to be needed when you can just run things to schedule and you don't need any signals at all! The problematic case is when variation is too big for that. That's when (from my memory -- was a while since I read the books) Goldratt leans on global ingress control instead of local signaling. But I do realise I may be misremembering. I should probably re-read some time soon.
- tome 4y agoI read it more recently than you and your memory matches mine. I was always surprised The Goal taught a push-based method rather than a pull-based one.
- deterministic 4y agoWhat I learned from "The Goal" is that any business/system will always have a single bottleneck that dictates the max throughput of the whole business/system. So as a manager it is your #1 objective to find that bottleneck and remove it. And the moment you remove it, the max throughput of the whole business/system improves until some other bottleneck is now limiting throughput. So you repeat finding and fixing that bottleneck etc. There are of course different ways to fix the bottleneck. Kanban is a famous example of one. However even with Kanban the business will still have a bottleneck that limits throughput.
- steppi 4y agoGot you. It seems like I'm the one misremembering. I thought they'd gotten more sophisticated than that by the end. I guess the story makes the ideas seem more powerful than they'd appear when laid out in a straight-forward way against competing processes.