Queueing
Every step has an owner. The waiting between them has none.
Process owners are assigned to the boxes. Most of the elapsed time is in the arrows, and an arrow with no owner is time nobody is accountable for or measuring.
Section
Fundamentals
The ideas the rest of it is built on, worked properly rather than defined and left there.
Constraints
We fixed the bottleneck and the output barely moved
A constraint that is relieved does not disappear, it relocates. Knowing where it goes next is the difference between one improvement and a program of them.
Measurement
We have no data. Where do we start?
The most common starting position in process work, and the one every method assumes you are not in. A week of deliberately cheap measurement gets you further than a data project.
Root cause
The five whys finds one cause, and most delays do not have one
Asking why five times works when a chain of single causes led to a single failure. It fails quietly on anything where the cause is a distribution rather than an event.
Constraints
We added two people and nothing came out any faster
Capacity is what a process could do. Throughput is what it does. Adding capacity anywhere except the constraint changes the first number and not the second.
Constraints
Most constraints get elevated before they are ever exploited
The five focusing steps are usually read as a list, and step two is the one that gets skipped. On this line it was worth fifteen percent for the price of a break rota.