Shifting Production Bottlenecks: Causes, Cures, and Conundrums
Abstract
We examine the phenomenon of shifting production bottlenecks fr m an analytic perspective.
We quantify the propensity of a work center to be a bottleneck, defined as maximal
queue length, using a simple Jackson production network model. Compa 'son of the analytic
model against an empirical simulation-based model shows that the two are in good agreement.
A scalar measure of bottleneck shiftiness is proposed and used to investigate several policies
for mitigating shiftiness. Simulation experiments show that several commonly observed
managerial policies for coping with shifting bottlenecks actually increase shiftiness. but that
shiftiness declines when the capacity of non bottleneck resources is increased.