the Basics explained
Capacity
Capacity explained
Find the bottleneck
Spare part 1 ⊗
Spare part 1 Spare part 1 Spare part 1Six months after Monza
Six months after the quality check in Monza, Marco sent me an email. Output had stabilised at fifty-two units a day. The team was pleased. He was pleased. He had framed the results for a board presentation.
He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that delivery times had started slipping again.
I drove back down in March.
The quality check was no longer the problem. It was running well — the reorganised workflow had held, the new checklist was embedded. But now packing was struggling to keep up. Orders were sitting finished and approved, waiting for boxes, labels, shipping documents. Two people doing a job that had quietly become a three-person job when output went up by nearly a third. Nobody had noticed because the attention had stayed on the quality check, which was now fine.
I pointed this out to Marco. He looked at the floor again — the same way he had six months earlier.
"We fixed the thing," he said. "I thought we were done."
That is the assumption that costs people the most. The bottleneck does not disappear when you solve it. It moves. The chain shifts, the pressure finds a new weak point, and if you are not looking for it, you will not see it until the results start slipping and nobody can say exactly why.
There is also a second problem, quieter and harder to see. When you fix a bottleneck, you often put rules in place to protect it — priorities, schedules, workarounds, agreements. Those rules made sense for the old problem. Once the Bottleneck moves, the rules stay. They accumulate. People follow them out of habit, or because they were never told they no longer applied. After a year, an organisation can be running on half a dozen procedures designed for problems it no longer has.
We spent that afternoon on packing. Three weeks later, delivery times were back to normal.
But what I told Marco before I left was more important than anything we did with the packing line.
"Set a date," I said. "In three months, walk the floor and ask the same question you asked six months ago. Where is it slowing down? Where are people waiting? Where is the work piling up? The answer will be different. It always is."
Continuous improvement is not a project with an end date. It is the same five steps, repeated. Every time you finish, you start again.
The bottleneck never disappears. It just moves to somewhere you are not looking yet.
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Quality check in Monza
It was a Tuesday in November, somewhere in an industrial zone north of Milan. I had been invited by a family business that manufactured metal components — good clients, third generation, proud of their machines. The factory manager's name was Marco. He wanted to show me everything. First the intake, then the production line, then packing, then dispatch. He walked fast, with the kind of pride you see in people who built something themselves.
At each station he named the capacity. Eighty units a day at intake. Sixty-five at processing. Ninety at packing. Seventy at dispatch.
He said it in the tone of someone presenting good numbers. I asked him what the quality check could handle.
A short silence.
"Thirty," he said.
"And how many do you ship per day?"
"Thirty."
I said nothing.
He looked at the floor.
We walked back to his office. On his desk was a proposal from a supplier — new packing machines, plus forty percent capacity, ninety thousand euros. He had already requested a quote.
"Marco," I said, "if you buy those machines, how many units will you ship per day?"
He thought for a moment. "Thirty," he said quietly.
That was the moment he saw it. Not as an accusation — just as a fact.
A chain delivers what its weakest link allows. Everything before and after can run as fast as it likes: the quality check decided what came out at the end. The new packing machines would simply wait faster.
We spent that afternoon on the quality check alone. Not the whole factory — just that one step.
Two additional inspectors, a different table layout, a simpler checklist.
Four weeks later: fifty-two units a day. The rest of the line had been capable of that for years.
He didn't buy the machines.
What I learned that day: it's not about the average -> it's not about the sum. It's about the one place where everything piles up, waits, and stalls.
That place determines what the system delivers — not what it could theoretically produce if everything were ideal.
Improve the wrong step, and you work harder for the same result. Improve the bottleneck, and the whole chain moves with it.
Find it first. Then fix it.