One piece flow
Imagine everyone who is required to ensure the work item is delivered to the customer is ready and waiting for the work and doesn’t work on anything else.
So as soon as the work is passed on, it is worked on, so the waiting time for the work item goes down to zero and the lead time significantly reduces.
The above scenario results in the best flow efficiency.
When Sum of (w) = 0, Flow Efficiency is 100%
The fire brigade is a good example of this model the fire crew are available to respond to any emergency within seconds/minutes.
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How about the resource efficiency?
The resource efficiency is at the minimum as most of the time we are waiting for work to come in and we have plenty of slack to deal with work when it comes.
Our management training and organisational behaviours value resource efficiency, so we make sure that we work on at least one work item. We start work as soon as one work item arrives.
Busyness is valued and rewarded!
The following are the attributes of busyness approach:
- The Flow Efficiency is significantly reduced as our focus is on doing our bit of the work and not the completion of it from the customer perspective.
- The order we select and do our bit of the work is not necessarily aligned with the customer delivery.
- We work in batches of work to ensure that we do not run out of work and resources efficiency is increased.
How do we get the best of both worlds?
We trade-off some lead time for resource efficiency, meaning that we tolerate some increase in our lead time and improve our resource efficiency.
How do we do this?
We create buffers and limit the number of work items in the buffer to improve resource efficiency and maintain a good flow efficiency.
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