Optimizing production’s potential

OPT has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Essentially it revolves around a philosophy of identifying the bottlenecks in a production system and minimising their impact on that system, though it has often been wrongly identified with the proprietary software for achieving this philosophy. Successful implementation of OPT requires a change in the performance measures applied to manufacturing. However, if these are made, substantial benefits can be obtained equivalent, in many respects, to those claimed for JIT but in a wider range of contexts than those to which just-in-time methods apply.