Factory Physics¶
Hopp, W. J., & Spearman, M. L. (2011). Factory Physics. Waveland Press.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Bottleneck
- The relation is the mathematical minimum, not the average or the sum, which is why intuition built on additive aggregation systematically mispredicts where to intervene.
This sourceDevelops the science of operations in which system throughput is governed by the bottleneck (minimum) rate rather than an additive sum or average of stage capacities, formalizing why additive intuition mispredicts where to intervene and reducing a many-capacity system to a single governing variable.
- The relation is the mathematical minimum, not the average or the sum, which is why intuition built on additive aggregation systematically mispredicts where to intervene.
- Decision
- Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
- Loading Dose
- In manufacturing and supply, initial inventory builds for a launch exceed steady-state replenishment.
This sourcePipeline/anticipation inventory and pre-build stock that exceed steady-state replenishment to fill a system before a demand spike, distinct from ongoing replenishment that balances usage.
- In manufacturing and supply, initial inventory builds for a launch exceed steady-state replenishment.
- Reserve
- Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
- System Slack
- The slack appears wasteful during Scenario 1 (the engineer didn't produce billable hours); the slack proves essential during Scenario 2 (company can respond while maintaining stability)
This sourceDevelops the science of operations in which system throughput is governed by the minimum (bottleneck) rate rather than an additive sum or average of stage capacities, formalizing why intuition built on additive aggregation mispredicts where to intervene and reducing a many-capacity system to a single governing variable.
- The slack appears wasteful during Scenario 1 (the engineer didn't produce billable hours); the slack proves essential during Scenario 2 (company can respond while maintaining stability)
- Unevenness Waste
- The compression also sorts the interventions, each attacking one of the three terms — mean utilization, raw variance, or variance propagation between stages. Level the demand — smooth arrivals through production levelling, appointment scheduling, request shaping, or demand-response pricing. Build buffers — hold inventory, slack, or queueing room to absorb the variance that cannot be smoothed. Decouple stations — insert work-in-progress buffers between stages so one stage's variance does not propagate. Pool capacity — combine independent demand streams to reduce relative variance, since a shared pool of servers beats the same number of private servers under random arrivals.
This sourceEstablishes the pooling principle in queueing/operations terms — a shared (M/M/c) server pool outperforms the same number of separate M/M/1 servers at equal total utilization because pooling cuts relative variance.
- The compression also sorts the interventions, each attacking one of the three terms — mean utilization, raw variance, or variance propagation between stages. Level the demand — smooth arrivals through production levelling, appointment scheduling, request shaping, or demand-response pricing. Build buffers — hold inventory, slack, or queueing room to absorb the variance that cannot be smoothed. Decouple stations — insert work-in-progress buffers between stages so one stage's variance does not propagate. Pool capacity — combine independent demand streams to reduce relative variance, since a shared pool of servers beats the same number of private servers under random arrivals.
Mechanisms¶
- Workflow Queue Rebalancing
- It shines when parallel lanes share fungible work
This sourceShows how compatible work can be pooled across parallel servers through a shared queue.
- It shines when parallel lanes share fungible work
Verification¶
Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.
Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 7 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://search.worldcat.org/title/Factory-physics/oclc/1130089653 ×1
- https://www.waveland.com/browse.php?t=521 ×1
Registry ID ref:f4bb9e30957c · see in the full table