A bottleneck in the system; something preventing forward movement.
— Making Work Visible, Second Edition, Dominica Degrandis
Constraint
2 of our books define this term — and their definitions are worth reading side by side.
the term “constraint” to refer to the bottleneck that restricts flow through a value stream
— Flow Engineering, in “11 Leading Flow Engineering”, Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis
See also value stream · A3 · Capacity Utilization · Conflicting Priorities · Context Switch · Cycle Time
Filed under Flow & Lean