Very interesting. Great. Thanks for sharing. I'll apply the game with my industrial engineering students. Then, I give you the feedback. Best regards. J Lourenço, Dr (from Brazil)
I think that if you'd used Kanban instead of DBR and simply had each machine pull in whichever job was closest to fully done that still needed its processing you'd get a lot better throughput.
The Job Shop Game is very flexible. You can change the Order Cards to simulate different situations. There is a set of Advanced Order Cards that move the Constraint to the C resource (://public.wsu.edu/~engrmgmt/holt/em530/Docs/JobShopGameCards2.gif). Playing for 10-15 days with the Basic Order Cards and then shifting to the Advanced Order Cards for 10 days before returning to the Basic Order Cards allows you to practice Dynamic Buffer Management.
There is also a set of Order Cards to simulate a Balanced Line (see ://public.wsu.edu/~engrmgmt/holt/em530/Docs/JobShopGameCardsBalanced.gif). You will be surprised that the “choke and release” solution is the same for all these environment. (Written instructions are at: ://public.wsu.edu/~engrmgmt/holt/em530/Docs/JSGInstinfo.htm). Dr Holt
Choke and release actually doesn't help. When a job is "released" to your shop, the clock starts counting. When you release it to your floor may smooth out bottlenecks but holding back jobs which could fill in open capacity on your other work centers just wastes capacity. This video masks the problem to appear like there's a solution
Antranig Mardiros Right - and in fact the underutilization of capacity that isn't a bottleneck (subordination to the constraint) is one of the key paradoxes of TOC. As you point out, the exercise illustrated here will not increase capacity, instead the purpose is to reduce cycle time, WIP, and to increase predictability. Predictability here defined as 'after release to the floor'. One of the main advantages of this is to ensure that non-bottleneck resources don't overproduce - leading to Work in Progress / Inventory / Waste etc
