Notes:

Maintaining System Balance In a perfectly balanced plant, the output of stage I provides the exact input requirement for stage 2. Stage 2's output provides the exact input requirement for stage 3, and so on. In practice, however, achieving such a "perfect" design is usually both impossible and undesirable. One reason is that the best operating levels for each stage generally differ.

Another reason is that variability in product demand and the processes themselves generally lead to imbalance except in automated production lines which, in essence, are just one big machine. There are various ways of dealing with imbalance.

One is to add capacity to those stages that are the bottlenecks. This can be done by temporary measures such as scheduling overtime, leasing equipment, or going outside the system and purchasing additional capacity through subcontracting.

A second way is through the use of buffer inventories in front of the bottleneck stage to ensure that it always has something to work on.

A third approach involves duplicating the facilities of one department on which another is dependent.