Five questions to ask about your own operation
- 01Of your quoted lead time, how many hours is the product actually being worked on?
- 02Has anyone followed a single order from release to dispatch and timed each stage?
- 03Where does work in progress pile up on your shop floor, and has that place moved in the last year?
- 04Are you running large batches because changeovers take too long?
- 05The last time you added capacity, did lead time fall by as much as expected?
If the honest answer to the first question is a small fraction of the total, more capacity will not fix the lead time.
Where the time goes
In batch-based production, a part spends a small share of its elapsed time being processed. The rest is queueing: waiting for the next machine, the next operator, the rest of the batch, or space to move into. Adding capacity at one machine shortens a queue that was rarely the whole problem.
Layout makes it worse. When stages sit far apart and work moves in large batches, every handoff adds waiting time, and the queues between stages hide where the real constraint is.
What the recovery looked like
At an industrial equipment manufacturer, value-stream analysis showed that much of the elapsed cycle time was not productive time at all. The factory was running batch-oriented flow through an inefficient layout, creating bottlenecks and queues between stages.
Production areas were restructured to remove the steps that added no value, and 5S was used to make the workplace and the flow visible. Manufacturing cycle time fell by 47%.
Read the full case, with the limits of its evidence →
What to check this week
- Pick one recent order and record when it was actually being worked on, from release to dispatch.
- Walk the floor and count where work in progress is waiting, and how much of it there is.
- Compare the result with the lead time you quote to customers.
If processing time is a small fraction of the total, the opportunity is in the waiting, and the waiting is where to look first.