Understanding the Health Check - What's Next?
Glossary of Terms
| Word | Definition |
| Branching | Workflows that allow for alternative pathways of activity. |
| Bottleneck | A place in the operational flow where work tends to build up. For example, when you pour water out of a bottle, the size of the neck in the bottle determines the amount of water that can flow every second. There can be multiple bottlenecks, but only one bottleneck will be the system constraint. |
| Buckets | A collection point for jobs. |
| Buffers | A time gap that absorbs variation from the prerequisite tasks and prevents the variation in time from adversely impacting on the delivery performance of later workflows; works directly against the aggression of losses. |
| Buffer Penetration | A term reflecting the amount of the buffer time gap that has been consumed. A buffer is typically dived into three segments and management seek to complete all jobs before they penetrate beyond the second segment of the buffer. |
| Conditional Execution | Workflows that adjust to whether or not a job meets certain conditions. |
| Constraint | The weakest link in your business/system that determines the rate at which your system completes jobs. A constraint is a bottleneck in your system that limits the overall flow more than any other. |
| Decouples | Sequential workflows process is physically separated from each other, takes a continuous flow (sequence of activities) and makes it two separate flows (sequence of activities). |
| Hole-filler | A system where an upcoming short-term gap in demand is identified and filled, usually done with pricing or service incentives to customers who make an immediate decision to buy. |
| ‘Sell The Boards’: | The sales team can look at the visual control boards and determine what they should and shouldn’t sell to maintain high delivery performance to the customers. Sales targets and strategies are set based on status records of the visual control boards. |
| SOP | Standard Operating Procedures. |
| Throughput | The margin generated from a job equating to the sales value less the direct variable costs of delivering that job. The calculation specifically excludes the often-allocated day-to-day business cost that occur whether the job was not accepted or not, i.e. wages, electricity, leases. |
| Throughput Velocity | How fast a job generates money for the amount of time the constraint spends completing its contribution. |
Time To Go Do Your Health Check
This guide should help you complete the Health Check. Make sure to review your answers and look over any you may have needed clarification on. After you complete the Health Check, analyse your results, and see where you should improve in order to maximise the gains of your productivity journey.
