Lean-Driven Innovation

Making New-Product Value Flow ◾ 199

illustrated in The Goal does not suggest it, we put a buffer at every function,

not just at the bottleneck (prototype manufacturing). In 2009, The Goldratt

Institute would at least partially conrm the efcacy of this approach in the

book Velocity.

6

Another suggestion from Velocity that we had already validated when

thebook came out was to make the bottleneck our schedule point and

thento keep it that way even after the bottleneck was eliminated and a

different bottleneck was identied. All the Herbie team had to do was put 2

and 2 together—we had a schedule point, we had a tool to manage the WIP,

andw