Mary Wells sat in her office after a long walk through the manufacturing plant. She has been under a great deal of pressure from corporate to reduce the backlog of late orders. She knew the key to improving throughput was constraint management; however, the company has not managed the constraint very well. In fact, the bottleneck was idle as she toured the plant. The operators were taking their lunch break but failed to load the automated machine prior to leaving. Mary decided to call a meeting with production managers in the afternoon to discuss techniques for bottleneck management.

a. Explain how managers may identify bottleneck processes.

b. Why does an hour of lost production on a bottleneck affect throughput, but an hour of lost production on a nonbottleneck process does not?

c. What kinds of decisions might managers make concerning the efficient use of a bottleneck?