At first, the factory managers were skeptical. They had spent years optimizing every resource, making sure machines ran at full capacity, workers stayed busy, and no one stood idle. But despite their efforts, they still faced long lead times, daily battles, and unpredictable delays. What were they doing wrong?
Their breakthrough came when they realized something counterintuitive: efficiency isn’t about keeping every resource busy, it’s about ensuring the entire system moves smoothly. They thought they had an efficiency problem, but they actually had a flow problem.
Doing Less and Accomplishing More
Think about a supermarket checkout during peak hours. If there’s only one cashier open, a long line forms and customers are stuck waiting. The solution isn’t to make the cashier work faster or slow customers down, it’s to increase availability by opening more checkout lanes.
This is exactly what the factory managers finally understood. Their mistake was that they had been trying to optimize everything instead of ensuring enough availability where it was truly needed.
It initially felt wrong when some workers weren’t always busy and some machines sat idle. However, when they shifted their focus from local efficiency to flow efficiency, aligning everything around resource availability, things started happening. Lead times dropped, bottlenecks eased, and work flowed smoothly.
Why Traditional Resource Management Fails
Most businesses approach resource management in one of two ways:
• Maximizing utilization: ensuring people and machines stay busy at all times, which creates bottlenecks when demand fluctuates.
• Optimizing individual tasks: improving local efficiencies without considering system-wide impact, leading to friction and delays.
The result is unpredictable lead times, overburdened employees, and daily operational battles.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is thinking resource management is just about people. But resources are so much more than that.
• A worker cannot be productive without the right tools.
• A machine cannot operate efficiently without the right materials.
• A team cannot make decisions without the right information.
• A production line cannot function without the right equipment in place.
• A team cannot handle variation without the right mix of skills and adaptability.
If just one of these resources isn’t available exactly when needed, the entire flow is disrupted, no matter how hard people are working.
Finding the Right Balance Between Flow and Resource Efficiency
A common reservation is: “I can’t just add more resources, it’s too expensive!” which is true. But when resources are unavailable, the costs will show up elsewhere:
• People waiting instead of working.
• Work piling up before bottlenecks.
• Expediting and overtime costs to catch up.
By understanding your flow, you identify where availability matters most, your bottleneck. Sometimes that bottleneck should be highly utilized because it sets the pace for the entire system. But instead of pushing every resource to full capacity, you align everything else to support the bottleneck and keep the system moving.
How the Manufacturer Transformed Its Operations
Remember the factory from the start of this article? In their case, this realization led to a major transformation. They had been struggling with chronic delays, trying to keep every machine and every worker busy. But that approach only created excess inventory, overburdened assembly lines, and unpredictable lead times.
By shifting to flow-oriented resource management they were able to:
• Balance workloads across teams, reducing final assembly bottlenecks.
• Introduce a pull-based system, aligning production with real demand.
• Train employees to work flexibly, improving responsiveness.
At the start of the transformation, managers became worried when they saw inactive machines. But the results proved that the approach worked:
• There was a 30% reduction in lead time.
• There were fewer stoppages and better predictability.
• The changes enabled a stable, efficient flow.
Conclusion
To summarize, effective resource management isn’t about pushing every resource to its limit, it’s about ensuring the right ones are available at the right time. When organizations focus on availability to support overall flow, they gain the ability to handle variation, reduce lead times, ease bottlenecks, and create stable, predictable performance.
Sustainable success comes not from doing more, but from enabling your resources to do the right things at the right moments. That’s how availability becomes the driver of true efficiency and long-term results.
The Resource Management program, led by Nicklas Grellson, helps companies rethink their approach, eliminating silos and waste while optimizing resources for sustainable success.
Want to know more? Get in touch with us today!
