Capacity is the amount a given group, team, or individual can produce. It is determined by factors such as productivity, staffing, hours of operations, equipment limitations, defects/scrap, setup time requirements, number of shifts, equipment maintenance requirements, and a host of other factors. When does capacity become most important? As any Read more…
Buffer time, in project management, is the extra time added into a time estimate to keep a project on track. The purpose of this leeway in planning is risk management. It allows project managers to be able to account for unforeseen situations without having to change the coordination of a Read more…
The term “bottleneck” (capacity constraint) comes from the area at the top of the bottle that limits the flow coming out. It doesn’t matter how big the rest of the bottle is—liquid will only flow out as fast as the size of the neck will allow. That is stating the Read more…
Waste reduction is a cornerstone of Lean. Waste is anything that does not add value to a process or serve the customer. The first step to eliminating waste is identifying it. Most people do this by observing a process and looking for inefficiency or redundancy. Although you can learn a Read more…