From the course: Constraint and Bottleneck Management
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Process mapping to identify the constraint
From the course: Constraint and Bottleneck Management
Process mapping to identify the constraint
- When considering your operations, drawing out an appropriate process map of the whole system is the place to start. Try to keep it simple to start with, breaking down the system into three to 10 process steps. You can always go into more detail later when we know where we need to give our further attention. Imagine a fast food sandwich bar making foot long toasted sandwiches. The process map may look like this. From the shop's point of view, you take the customer's order, add the meat and cheese, toast it in the oven, add salad, wrap it, and collect payment at the till. Each of those processes takes a different amount of time and so has its own individual capacity. If we make a few simplifying assumptions in this example, no shared resources, so one employee per process, perfect reliability and availability, then the process time correlates directly to each process's individual capacity. We can easily identify the constraint as the process with the lowest capacity, in this case…
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