Tracking of these items can contribute to a companies understanding of customer experiences and preferences. Often easier to establish than Financial measures, and direct attention to physical processes and provide immediate short-term feedback on quality improvement success. A key competitive factor and has various partitions. Order delivery time is the time from pick up of the order from manufacturing to final delivery to the customer. A bottleneck is an operations where the work required to be performed approaches or exceeds the available capacity.
Demands exceeds capacity and delays occur.
A time driver is identified as being a factor which causes a change in the speed of an activity. When time is a key competitive factor managerial accountants must attempt to determine the cost of delays. Thus the concept of 'average waiting time' is introduced, the average amount of time that an order will wait in line before it is set up and processed. This is because of uncertainty about when will place an order. The denominator in this formula measures excess capacity or cushion.