Constraints, work capability, throughput and flow
Today I want to tell you a little bit of a story about a festival in England. You know what the English summertime is like. We went to a thing called Pub in the Park in Marlow, and it was raining. It rained really heavily. And we were wondering what to eat and we saw these different stalls and we were disappointed with the food we were getting. I was waiting a long time for my pizza, but I noticed something that they weren’t overloading themselves because they were taking their time taking the orders. They slowed down the arrival rate of orders coming to the pizza stall. So it meant, there was really like a very good flow, that The people were working completely in tandem.
I could see there was a constraint there on the pizza oven. They probably could have done with two pizza ovens and that person seemed to be under a lot of pressure. But they didn’t take on any more work than they had the capability to take on. They were fully utilized but they first optimized their flow.
It was like a really tiny portion for a lot of money. And so we said, let’s get some pizza. And we went to a pizza stall and there was a big, long queue. I asked my family to go in under a tent and I just had an umbrella, luckily, and I had rain gear and I waited in the queue and I was waiting for quite a while.