Where is your work stuck? How two shops found the bottleneck hiding in the office
Everyone’s busy, the shop is moving, the PMs are buried, and somehow at the end of the month the profit doesn’t match the effort.
If you own a millwork shop, you’ve probably said some version of that out loud in the last 30 days. It feels like six different problems, but it’s one: a bottleneck you can’t see. The fix starts with a single question. Where is your work stuck?
Your shop only moves as fast as its slowest step
Eli Goldratt laid this out in his 1984 book The Goal, and it’s the foundation INNERGY was built on. Every operation has one step that sets the pace for everything else, which means speeding up any other step doesn’t make you faster. It just piles up more work in front of the slow one.
That has an uncomfortable implication for where you spend your attention. Most owners put 80 percent of it on the shop floor and 20 percent in the office, and in most shops that allocation is exactly backwards.
Here’s why. Goldratt’s way to find the bottleneck is to look for where work piles up. The pile is the diagnosis. On the floor that works great, because carts stacked in front of the finishing line are hard to miss. But in custom millwork, your most expensive pile usually isn’t made of parts. It’s made of information: the drawing sitting in the drafter’s queue, the submittal waiting on the architect, the revisions stacking up after a field change while a PM asks the same person for the same status three times in a week.
None of that is visible. A drawing that’s been sitting in a queue for two weeks looks exactly like one that’s been there for two hours, but that two-week queue is hurting your throughput just like a broken machine would. You can’t walk past it and see it.
That’s the problem INNERGY’s bottleneck report solves. It shows you where your dollars are sitting at every step of your workflow, so the invisible pile becomes as obvious as the carts on the floor. On a recent webinar, two shop owners told us what that visibility changed for them.
RCS Millwork: blaming the floor for an office problem
Joe Keller at RCS Millwork, a 100-person architectural woodworking shop, was sure the bottleneck was production. Work orders were going out the door already overdue, and when the floor missed deadlines, the floor took the heat. Sound familiar?
But as Joe put it, his shop never had a chance to win, because the work was late before it ever hit the floor. The real bottleneck was in the office: submittals sitting in customer review, often sent late without enough review time built in.
The cost of running blind might also sound familiar. RCS’s general manager, one of the most highly paid people in the company, tracked every job on a spreadsheet so large it couldn’t be shared. He spent roughly 80 hours a week on data entry just to keep it current, and it still couldn’t tell anyone where work was actually stuck.
Joe’s advice now is simple. On the floor, walk out and look for the carts. In the office, look at your bottleneck report. RCS uses it to see where dollars and hours are sitting by department and by project manager, which lets them spot a heavy month coming and pull work forward to level the load.
The payoff: after putting bottleneck management into practice, RCS moved from lower-quartile AWI profitability to upper quartile and held it there for several years. They weren’t doing more work. They were doing the same work far more profitably.
Busby Cabinets: 90 days instead of 18 months
John Miller at Busby Cabinets, a 75-person high-end residential shop, will tell you straight: if you own a company, you have a bottleneck. The only question is whether you know where it is.
His has moved over the years, from installation to engineering to finishing. Each time, his team worked the same playbook from Theory of Constraints: find the bottleneck, get everything you can out of it before spending a dime, and only then think about new people or machines.
Breaking the engineering bottleneck was supposed to take 18 months to two years. It took 90 days.
Finishing held the bigger surprise. Once the team had real data, it showed 60 to 65 percent of finishing capacity was being burned on rework, redoing parts that had already been through the department once. When they dug into the cause, much of it traced back to voids in their 5-ply core material that had crews filling and resanding flat panels three or four times.
The fix sounds wrong on paper: buy more expensive plywood. Busby switched to 11-ply Baltic birch at two to three times the material cost, and it was still an easy call, because it cut the rework in half and freed up capacity they didn’t know they had. In 90 days, finishing capacity grew by about 50 percent without a new hire or a new machine. That’s the part worth sitting with. The answer to their capacity problem wasn’t capacity at all.
Today Busby’s bottleneck is the market. They need more work to fill the capacity they’ve uncovered.
Asked which report he’d hand his past self on day one, John didn’t hesitate: the bottleneck report. Where’s my work stuck? Why is it stuck? What will it take to get it unstuck? It also gave his whole team a common language, so the conversation moved from “we’re missing deadlines and we don’t know why” to a focused fix.
Three moves for Monday morning
You don’t need to measure capacity at every step, and you don’t need a consultant. Start here:
- Map your workflow steps, office included. Estimating and drafting count just as much as cutting and finishing.
- Look for the pile. On the floor, it’s carts. In the office, ask your PMs and drafters where work sits waiting. That dead work-in-process is your answer.
- Attack the bottleneck first. Before you spend money, ask what process or policy change would free up capacity at that one step. Both Joe and John found their biggest gains there.
And if your pile is hiding in the office, the bottleneck report makes it visible: every job, every step, every dollar sitting still. See it in action.