ABSTRACT
Continuous flow manufacturing principles promote focus on improving production process bottlenecks or constraining operations to the exclusion of all other improvement efforts. The goal is to increase throughput while simultaneously decreasing inventories and true operating expenses. Continuous flow manufacturing does an excellent job of prioritizing areas for improvement and aligning the improvement process to the financial goals of net profit and return on investment. total productive maintenance provides specific methods of improving the manufacturing processes which have been prioritized by the Theory of Constraints. Another measure commonly used to evaluate the Theory of Constraints/continuous flow manufacturing process is manufacturing cycle time (MCT). The easiest way to measure MCT is to mark a particular part of raw material with a time/date stamp when the raw material is received at the receiving dock.
