Buffer management

Concept

Deciding where to place buffers of stock or time in a production system and how big to make them, so that disturbances do not stop the bottleneck or the customer delivery.

Opis

Buffers are stocks of parts or reserves of time that decouple steps in a process, so that a short stop in one does not at once stop the next. Buffer management is the choice of where buffers sit, how large they are and how they are watched.

Too small a buffer means starvation, where a step runs out of work, and blocking, where a step cannot pass on its output. Too large a buffer ties up capital and hides problems. In the theory of constraints, the most important buffer protects the bottleneck, because lost time there is lost for the whole plant. Teams watch how full the buffer is: a buffer that is often empty shows a problem upstream, one that is always full shows a problem downstream. Simulation is often used to test buffer sizes before a line is built.

Słownik

Eksperci i firmy w tym temacie

• Mirko Peters · Microsoft MVP

Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-11