The average review cycle time was 54.3 days. The bottleneck in a production-inventory network is commonly taken to be the facility that most limits flow through the network and thus the most highly utilized facility. We consider systems in which various components are produced through a series of stages holding intermediate inventories and are then assembled into finished goods to meet external demands. With each station in the network we associate precise measures of the station's propensity to constrain the fill rate. We call a station with a minimal measure a fill-rate bottleneck and justify this label both theoretically and numerically.
Examples show that even the least utilized facility can be a fill-rate bottleneck.
Unlike utilization, our bottleneck criteria capture information about process variability. The consulting Senior Editor was Michael Harrison. The average review cycle time was 40.7 days.