Savvy Business
Manufacturing / flow & capacity

Every factory has a bottleneck. That's not a flaw — it's where the leverage is.

It's a fact of how production works, not something gone wrong. Once you know where yours is, you stop fighting it and start building your whole floor around it — with software only where it earns its place.

Fig. 1 — production flow, four stations
Four-station production flow. Painting is the bottleneck and sets the pace.01 CUTTING02 ASSEMBLY03 PAINTINGBOTTLENECKSETS THE PACE04 DISPATCH

Sound familiar?

Orders slip even though everyone's busy.

The floor is working flat out, and deliveries still run late — because effort and output aren't the same thing.

The whiteboard, the spreadsheet, and the WhatsApp group all disagree.

Nobody actually knows what's next off the line until someone walks the floor and asks.

A system was bought to fix this, and it didn't.

The software works fine — it just automated the same guesswork that was already there.

Where should we start?

PICK THE ONE THAT SOUNDS LIKE YOURS