Production Scheduling for the Process Industries

Chapter 26 Managing Bottlenecks and Constraints

DOI: 10.4324/9781003304067-30

Many production lines have bottlenecks or constraints, steps in the process that don’t have enough effective capacity to handle the demand or cannot handle the demand under certain conditions. That can be because the step doesn’t have the inherent capacity required, that OEE factors (see Chapter 24) reduce the effective capacity to an insufficient level, or that some product mix and timing combinations exceed their capacity. For simplicity, we will call them bottlenecks in this book. Bottlenecks are more likely to be a problem in process manufacturing than in discrete parts assembly. Equipment can be very expensive, so there is a tendency not to build much excess ...