3. Creates Higher Productivity. The reason it appears that productivity is highest when your operation is organized by department is because each department is measured by equipment utilization and people utilization. But in fact it is hard to determine how many people are needed to produce a certain number of units in a large batch operation because productivity is not measured in terms of value-added work. Who knows how much productivity is lost when people are "utilized" to overproduce parts, which then have to be moved to storage. How much time is lost tracking down defective parts and
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