Backlog Oriented Bottleneck Management – Practical Guide for Production Managers

Abstract

Today’s productions systems become more and more complex, comprising a multitude of different resources interacting with each other. The Theory of Constraints (TOC) describes the dilemma that the overall output of such a system is constrained by one or more resources called “bottlenecks”. Identifying those bottlenecks has been subject of many research papers. Classical approaches focus typically solely on the bottleneck utilization and neglect accumulated deviations against the planned utilization. This so-called backlog is critical as it has a direct effect on the on-time-delivery. This paper therefore provides a practical approach that can be used by the operative management in order to identify, prioritize and manage bottlenecks in a backlog situation efficiently and effectively.