Capacity went up 30%. Throughput went up 4%.

Money spent on the wrong machine buys nothing but a longer queue somewhere else, and the accounts almost never reveal which machine was wrong.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Capacity went up 30%. Throughput went up 4%.

A business that is visibly straining buys more capacity. A second machine, a third van, two more engineers, a bigger licence tier. The invoice is real, the asset arrives, and six months later the output figures have barely moved. Everyone is still busy. Lead times are still long. The obvious conclusion, that the forecast was optimistic, is usually wrong. The more common explanation is that the money went to a resource that was never the constraint. This is one of the few operational problems where the diagnosis is genuinely harder…

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