Every production system has a bottleneck. Ours is a practical method for finding yours, protecting it, and letting it set the pace for the rest of the floor. The name in the textbooks is Drum-Buffer-Rope. The idea is older than software, and simpler.
Whatever that station can finish is what the factory can ship. Schedule it first. Everything else is accompaniment.
A time buffer of the right work sits in front of the bottleneck so a hiccup upstream never leaves it idle. The buffer is a fuse, not a warehouse.
Jobs are not launched because a machine is free. They are launched because the drum has room. That is how you stop the floor filling up with the wrong work.
Walk the floor. Look for the pile of work, the idle people downstream, the machine that is never waiting for the next job. That is the bottleneck. You do not need a model to see it — you need to look at flow instead of utilisation.
Before you buy another machine or hire another shift, stop wasting the one you have. The bottleneck should never be waiting for a decision, a missing part, or a job that is not ready. Protect its time as if it were the whole factory. Because, for throughput, it is.
This is the uncomfortable part, and the part that actually works. Upstream stops releasing work just to stay busy. Downstream stops being measured on local efficiency. Sales promises dates the bottleneck can keep. The whole plant takes its beat from one drum.
Most plants skip straight to this step: more people, more machines, more software. If you have not finished the first three, you are buying capacity you will waste. When the bottleneck really is fully exploited, then you raise it — and a new bottleneck will appear. That is normal. You repeat.
A method you cannot follow without a login is not a method. We get the rules right on the floor first — what is released, what waits, what the bottleneck is never allowed to starve of. If a system can enforce those rules, we will use it. If it would only record the old guesswork more neatly, we won't.
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