Capacity, bottlenecks and flow

Skills you'll practise

• Calculate a station's capacity from available time and time per unit, and compare it with demand and takt time
• Identify the bottleneck in a multi-step process from capacity, queue and idle-time evidence
• Use Little's law to relate work in progress, throughput and lead time
• Distinguish a capacity shortfall from a scheduling or release problem using daily demand and output data
• Choose improvement actions that follow the five focusing steps instead of adding capacity everywhere

Course outline

1. 1.Capacity, bottlenecks and flowVideo · 2 min
2. 2.Capacity, demand and takt timeLesson · 18 min
3. 3.Finding the bottleneckLesson · 18 min
4. 4.Capacity problem or scheduling problem?Lesson · 17 min
5. 5.Capacity, bottlenecks and flow: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 17 questions
6. 6.Hire another packer?Scenario
7. 7.Final exam8 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out

Sources it draws on

The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.

• Lean Enterprise Institute lexicon: takt time (available time ÷ customer demand)
• Goldratt, E. M.: The five focusing steps of the Theory of Constraints (North River Press summary)
• Little, J. D. C. (1961): A proof for the queuing formula L = λW, Operations Research 9(3)
• General operations and warehouse practice