Find and manage the bottleneck
Find the step that limits what the plant can produce and organize everything else to its pace: an hour lost there is lost for the whole plant.
The task in figures
- Gives you back
- It does not recur every month
- Elmira today
- Helps
- Frequency
- Per project
- Who does it today
- Senior
- Version
- Elmira Senior
What hurts today.
What is easy gets improved, not what limits.
The bottleneck stops at lunch break.
Nobody watches the constraint every day.
Every plant has one step that limits how much it can deliver, and improving any other does not increase output. Managing it, as the theory of constraints proposes, means finding it by measuring capacity and inventory, making sure it never stops for lack of material, people or maintenance, scheduling the rest to its pace and, if it is still the constraint, raising its capacity. A senior leads it, and the hardest part is watching it every day.
Done today with
- Expert
- In-person meeting
- On the floor
- Spreadsheet
- Email and chat
- BI dashboard
Each step, today and with Elmira.
Finding the constraint is your work. Elmira sets down each measure to protect it as an action with its owner, records its output every day and tells you how it is doing.
| Step | Today | With Elmira |
|---|---|---|
| Measure each step’s capacity and inventory | On the floor, Spreadsheet1 h – 4 h | Still by hand |
| Identify the constraint | Expert, Spreadsheet30 min – 1.5 h | Still by hand |
| Decide how to protect it: material, people and maintenance | In-person meeting, Expert1 h – 3 h | Still by hand |
| Turn each measure into an action with an owner | Spreadsheet, Email and chat15 min – 30 min | |
| Schedule the rest of the flow to its pace | In-person meeting, Expert1 h – 3 h | Still by hand |
| Follow its output and its stops every day | Spreadsheet, BI dashboard10 min – 20 min |
The conversation
No example conversation: the Obeyaka web app does it, or it comes later.
Does this happen to your team?
Book a demo and we will show you Elmira doing this task.
More cases of lean tools on the shop floor
- Track each line’s and shift’s OEEThe OEE arrives when the shift is already over.
- Cut changeover times (SMED)The changeover is done differently on each shift.
- Implement total productive maintenance (TPM)Maintenance lives firefighting.