We promise 4 weeks. We hit it maybe 60% of the time. Customers are getting frustrated and I don't know if I need to hire or just reorganize.
The situation
Tom runs a 3-person custom furniture shop. He builds to order with a stated 4-week lead time. About 40% of orders are late — sometimes by a day, sometimes by two weeks. His instinct is that he needs a fourth craftsman. His accountant thinks the shop is just disorganized.
The analysis
A fourth craftsman would sit idle — finishing, not overall capacity, is the actual constraint.
When Tom maps the production workflow — order intake → cutting → assembly → finishing → QC → delivery — the simulation immediately surfaces the constraint. The cutting station and assembly bench are roughly balanced (each taking 4–6 hours per piece). But the single finishing station — staining, sealing, and final inspection, handled by one person — takes 6–9 hours and can't be parallelized. A complex order requiring multiple stain coats can occupy the finishing station for a full day, blocking two other orders that are sitting in the assembly queue fully built and waiting.
Adding a fourth full-time craftsman at $45,000/year would increase cutting and assembly capacity. But the simulation shows those steps are not saturated — utilization is around 65%. Finishing utilization is at 92%. The fourth craftsman would add overhead without moving the bottleneck.
The fix is more targeted: bring in a part-time finisher ($900/month) specifically for staining and sealing during the 2–3 days per week when the backlog builds. The model shows on-time delivery jumping from 61% to 89% with this change, at a fraction of the cost of a full hire.
The decision
Tom brings in a part-time finisher on a contract basis and saves the finishing-time distribution to his library, with Monitoring watching it against his production log. A few months in, Monitoring flags that finishing times have drifted upward — a run of custom multi-tone stain orders is taking longer than the original fit assumed. He brings the part-time finisher on for a fourth day a week before on-time delivery slips back down.
Try it yourself
Don't have this data yet? Here's where to start.
Track where each in-progress order sits at the end of every workday for two weeks — a sticky note per order on a whiteboard is sufficient. You'll see the bottleneck within a few days: it's wherever the notes pile up. Most shops can derive this in under an hour per day of observation. Even rough estimates reveal surprising insights.
Try this in the app
Open Process Map with this scenario pre-loaded and ready to explore.