Study of the Shifting Production Bottleneck: Possible Causes and Solutions

Theory of constraints (TOC) claims that each production system has at least one bottleneck resource and the bottleneck determines throughput of the whole system. Now more and more managers regard to exploit bottleneck resources. However, both literatures and facts show that bottleneck shiftiness does exit and sometimes is unavoidable. It makes bottleneck management problems become more complicated. This paper studies some factors that often cause bottleneck shift from one machine to another, including product-mix, production lot-size and load-balanced level, and puts forward corresponding solutions to overcome these problems based on basic principles of TOC, for providing enterprises some useful advices to prevent the appearance of those unexpected bottlenecks, or to reduce the unexpected production fluctuate when the shifting is unavoidable