The Three Bucket Theory --Dickeson

We've been speaking of global Wip—total work in process by week. Let's drill down in the data for a local view—by job. Can you tell me the Wip dwell time on a job-by-job basis for your plant? No? I doubt that any Management Information System supplier is providing this. We've never demanded it.

What would we learn? We'd discover more detail of throughput constraint properties, wouldn't we? What would we do about it? What actions would we take? Think about it. Want continuous improvement of productivity? Isn't this a prime place to look? Forget that job cost stuff and look at the Wip lag in days or hours, both locally and globally.