🏔️ South Park Example (Module 2, OPNS 430)

Designed by Daniela Hurtado-Lange. Operations Department, Kellogg School of Management.

Scenario

Consider an abstract process where task A needs to be completed first, then tasks B and C are performed in parallel with task D. Finally, task E is performed and it can only get started after tasks C and D are completed.

✏️ Edit the process (durations & who does each activity) — run your own what-ifs
ActivityAssigned toDuration (hrs)Depends on

The process

The  bottleneck resource (drives capacity)

⏱️ How responsive is my process?

Customer view
– hrsTheoretical Flow Time — time for one order, start to finish

Blocks laid out along time. The longest chain of dependent activities (the critical path) sets the flow time. Changing who does an activity does not move any block here.

🏭 How much business can it handle?

Resource view
– jobs/hrCapacity — steady-state throughput of the whole process

The same blocks re-stacked per person, ignoring the path. The tallest stack is the bottleneck; capacity = 1 ÷ its load. Give one person two activities and the stack grows.