Because manufacturing people trust their indicators, they won’t allow material to begin its journey through the factory if they think it is already operating at capacity. If they did, material might go halfway through and back up behind a bottleneck. Instead, factory managers say “no” at the outset and keep the start level from overloading the system. Other kinds of managers find this hard to apply because their indicators of capacity are not as well established or not as believable. How much time do you need to read your mail, to write your reports, to meet with a colleague? You may not know
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