The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2000–2001
ALCOA's fixed production cycle cleared its backlog and lifted output 20%
Instead of chasing every order, ALCOA ran its bottleneck on a fixed repeating cycle — output up 20% in eight months and the backlog nearly gone.
ALCOA (Engineering Products Division)
The solution
ALCOA's Engineering Products Division made aluminum tubing to order. The product lines succeeded so well that a backlog of customer orders built up and lead times stretched; frequent breakdowns at a bottleneck operation made the queue worse.
The plant switched to cyclic planning: a fixed, repeating production pattern on the constrained operation, with orders fitted into the cycle instead of the cycle re-planned around every order. Maintenance and workforce plans were built on the same cadence.
The results were immediate. Within eight months output rose over 20 percent and the order backlog nearly disappeared, with side benefits in workforce planning and machine maintenance scheduling.
Why it worked
- A fixed cycle removes the chaos of re-optimizing a queue daily
- Stable load at the bottleneck raises effective capacity
- Predictable rhythm makes maintenance and staffing schedulable
- Reducing variability cut the queue that created lead times
What can be applied
A bottleneck that is always overloaded gets more throughput from a stable repeating cycle than from heroics: schedule the rhythm, then let the rest of the plant fit around it.
Aftermath
The cyclic-planning result was published as an Interfaces case in 2001 and became a standard teaching example for bottleneck-focused production planning.
Sources
- Using Cyclic Planning to Manage Capacity at ALCOA
- Using Cyclic Planning to Manage Capacity at ALCOA (abstract)
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