The bottleneck you fixed is still where everyone is looking

You relieved the constraint, throughput rose, then it flattened again, and the whole business is still organised around a problem it no longer has.

By Steve 5 min read
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A familiar sequence: a business identifies its worst bottleneck (the single machine, the one qualified installer, the approvals step everything waits behind), and does something about it. Throughput improves. Lead times shorten. For a quarter or two, the investment looks like the best decision of the year. Then the gains flatten, complaints return, and overtime creeps back. The obvious inference is that the fix was too small, so the business buys more of the same thing. Sometimes that is right. More often, the constraint has moved somewhere else entirely, and…

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