Chapter 7 True/False

A bottleneck is an operation that has the lowest effective capacity of any operation in the process.

The process with the least capacity is called a bottleneck if its output is less than market demand

The process with the least capacity is called a bottleneck if its output is still greater than the market demand.

Operating processes close to their capacity can result in low customer satisfaction and even losing money despite high sales levels.

The Theory of Constraints method is also referred to as the drum-buffer-rope method.

According to the Theory of Constraints, the four operational measures include inventory, throughput, delivery lead times and utilization.

A business school with plenty of classroom space that hires adjunct faculty for a semester to meet unusually high student demand for courses is an example of elevating a bottleneck.

Any system composed of resources that are operating at maximum output will, by definition, have maximum output for the entire system.

In a shop managed according to TOC principles, inventory is needed only in front of bottlenecks in order to prevent them from sitting idle.

The first step in applying the Theory of Constraints is to identify the constraint.

The final step in applying the Theory of Constraints is to repeat the first four steps.

Lanny discovers that the bottleneck is the riveting machine so he schedules all production around when that machine is available. This is an example of elevating the constraint in the five-step constraint management process.

A bottleneck process has the lowest capacity and the longest total time from the start to the finish.

A competent operations manager should first eliminate all of the bottlenecks from the process.

Short term capacity planning should be driven by identification and management of bottlenecks.

Line balancing is the assignment of work to stations in a line to achieve the desired output rate with the smallest number of workstations.

Line balancing strives to create workstations so that the capacity utilization for the bottleneck is much higher than for the other workstations in the line.

Line balancing applies only to line processes that do assembly work, or to work that can be bundled in many ways to create the jobs for each workstation in the line.

Immediate predecessors are the smallest units of work that can be performed independently.

The balance delay is the amount by which efficiency falls short of 100 percent

To generate the maximum output, the cycle time should be set as the longest elemental task time.

Paced lines require that inventory storage areas be placed between stations.

A mixed-model line produces several items belonging to the same family.