00:10We find that organizations tend to confuse problems with capacity constraints on bottlenecks.
00:15It happened again last week when we were in Spain doing a diagnostic of a company.
00:19We participated in the stand-up meeting and they said hey we the bottleneck is over here in this
00:25part of the factory and we talked about it because in fact all it was was a non-bottleneck which
00:30had
00:30a massive excess capacity but they'd done a staffing problem and there was some absenteeism
00:34so that resource got two days of work overdue in front of it right and therefore yes it had to
00:41catch up it was not a bottleneck it wasn't a wandering bottleneck it was a non-bottleneck
00:46that just had a problem okay and so you must avoid talking about the theory constraints in this way
00:52because if you do that you won't be staying focused on the true constraint the resource
00:56that chronically has less capacity than all the other resources in the system right and
01:00then you apply the five focus steps to exploit it better get more throughput and all that stuff
01:04right wandering bottlenecks are very very very rare in the real world okay people are confusing it
01:10with waves of work or quality problems absenteeism and stuff right that those things have to be
01:14sold they are not the capacity constraint okay another case we find if i go back a few more months
01:19uh is people confusing their constraint with their chronic problem okay uh so another example this
01:25one from france uh world leader making ball bearings uh they described their capacity constraint as the
01:31rectification of the of the balls uh i couldn't understand why they were saying that because a
01:36quick calculation showed that there was ample excess capacity in that part of the factory okay so we
01:41discussed it and what was emerged was in fact it was their main quality problem right what was happening
01:47was that they would make the outside and inner bearings okay and then at final assembly they
01:52would add the balls and make sure the uh a ball bearing moved correctly had no friction and stuff
01:58okay and uh in fact the ball that was inserted was the adjustment factor right and if necessary
02:04they would rectify it they would remove a couple of microns from the diameter to ensure that they
02:09had a uh correct ball bearing okay this since it wasn't planned in in the routings happened at the last
02:15moment when
02:16the order was just about to be uh had to be delivered very soon so there was a big panic
02:20and so they
02:20spent many much of their morning meetings discussing you know these problems with batches that had to
02:25be rectified immediately and it was late and you know this okay and that that hit a real capability
02:30issue that was later dealt with right but uh that was not a capacity constraint okay so watch out
02:36don't convert confuse punctual problems or chronic problems with your capacity constraint
Commentaires