Once Al and his team identify their bottlenecks – the NCX-10 machine and the heat treating process, they try several techniques to relieve the situation. These actions include putting quality control in front of the bottlenecks, training people to give special care to bottleneck parts, activating three machines to supplement the NCX-10, instituting new lunch rules, assigning certain people to work exclusively at the bottlenecks, increasing batch sizes going into heat-treat, and implementing a new priority system (red/green tags).

The positive results of these initial steps lead to a new plant record in shipments and a 12% decline in the work-in-process. Champagne corks are popped and everything seems headed in the right direction – except Al’s relationship with Julie. Then Al receives a phone call from Stacey. She fears the bottlenecks have “spread.” Al puts in a quick call to Jonah, who agrees to another visit.

As Jonah wades through huge piles of inventory and questions the team on the operations, he quickly identifies the problem. Which of the implemented techniques above does Jonah contribute to the stacks of inventory?