While slotting our 12-machine cell for tomorrow’s 6 a.m. start, I remembered that Gantt charts first showed up in machine shops around 1910 to keep crews and output visible. What other old-school scheduling tricks do you use to keep a ten-op router on pace without burning out the team?
‘Ten-op router’? We cap WIP with T-cards and a 1-slot buffer; 6 a.m. board flags aging jobs.
We run a pegboard drum-buffer-rope: the bottleneck sets the beat like a metronome, and a single traveler with a clothespin is the only thing allowed past the rope — “if it’s not on the peg, it’s not real.” It’s low-tech but can bite if the constraint flips midday, so we pair it with a 4-hour horizon on the 6 a.m. board. @thomas61, have you tried timeboxing like that instead of a bigger WIP cap?