System Critical: Local Optimization Error
Busy is not the same
as Profitable.
Think of your factory like a restaurant kitchen. You have a prep chef chopping vegetables at 100% efficiency. But your grill can only cook 10 steaks an hour. The grill is your bottleneck.
The client doesn't pay you when the vegetables are chopped; they pay you when the meal is served.
If you tell the prep chef to work at maximum speed, he’ll just fill the kitchen with chopped onions. This is excess inventory (WIP), and it hides quality problems and ties up your cash before it can hit the bottleneck.
Stop measuring busyness. Start measuring the grill.