An Industrial Example of TOC-application:

A leading Scooter factory of northern India had an assembly line, in which there was special purpose machine (SPM). It contained four workstations. Station 1 was for loading/unloading of the parts (which is crank shaft).

The second, third and fourth workstations were for several operations in a sequential order. These operations were, spot-facing, drilling, chamfering, boring & counter boring. The company hired consultant-team. The consultants observed the total assembly line. SPM was discovered to be heavily loaded. The expense of duplicating SPM was too high. The company wished to enhance the production capacity of the plant (that was about 30,000 two-wheelers). The cycle-time on SPM was around 71 seconds per part. It was lesser somewhere else in the assembly line. Hence, SPM was identified as the bottleneck. The consultants deliberated on the functioning of SPM and designed a combination tool, which was enough for all of the operations; earlier carry out on the three stations (Stations 2, 3 and 4).

 (b) Proposed Change in SPM : Handling of Bottleneck Machine by Introducing Two Combination-tools' at Stations 2 and 4

Figure: An Industrial Example of TOC Application

This improvement in SPM, by introducing two combination tools (of same type) at stations 2 and 4 and two loading/unloading stations at stations 1 and 3; virtually increased the throughput by nearly seventy percent (Ideally, it must have been. little more due to increase capacity of the SPM). One of the significant lessons of this case- example is: reduced set-up time enhanced the throughput. By joining three operations, which were easier carry out on three stations, there is substantial saving in non-value-added time of production. The bottleneck capacity enhance dramatically due to more time available for value-added operations. By the way, once this SPM ceased, to be the bottleneck, another proceure in the assembly line would become the constraint. Now The Company may wish to attack the emerging bottleneck machine/operation for 'increasing the throughput to a still higher level.