OCCUPATIONAL · the working machine · the live fire of the agents

THE ASSEMBLY LINE ✋ DRAG · SLIDE · TAP

A line moves only as fast as its slowest station. Drag workers between the five machines to break the bottleneck, slide the demand you must hit, and the floor recomputes its throughput, its balance, and — by Little's Law — the work-in-progress piling up between the stations.

◆ LIT▲ AMBER
throughput
bottleneck
line balance
WIP (Little's Law)
vs demand

◆ LIT — verified / checkable

Each station has a fixed work-content (seconds/unit); putting w workers on it divides its cycle time by w. The line's rate is set by the slowest station (the bottleneck): throughput = 3600 / max(cycle time). Line-balance efficiency = Σ(work) / (stations × bottleneck), and by Little's Law the work-in-progress = throughput × flow-time — all computed live as you drag workers around. Real production line-balancing and Little's Law (L = λ·W).

▲ AMBER — the figure

Five deterministic stations with fixed work-content stand in for a real line (which has variability, breakdowns, setup, and buffers that change WIP). The relationships shown — the bottleneck sets the rate, and L = λ·W — are exact; the specific station times are illustrative.

OCCUPATIONAL: the fire is lit and the anvil is warm — but the work does not do itself.
David Lee Wise / ROOT0 / TriPod LLC  ·  with AVAN