The Goal adopts the opposite approach. Instead of a theorist’s oversimplification, it embraces the true nature of reality as its starting point, arguing that a balanced plant must deteriorate rapidly into chaos.
More, the only hope for salvation is to deliberately unbalance it!
The Goal shows that that the key to doing this—without throwing caution to the wind—is to maintain a small number of strategically-located queues of WIP within your plant.
You can easily determine the placement, size and make-up of these queues using the ultimate source of management intelligence: your bottleneck (or constraint).
With strategic WIP queues, it becomes possible to manage the production and release of work so the constraint always has work.
And with the knowledge that shop output can only ever be the same as the output of your constraint, it’s finally possible to meaningfully schedule the volume and sequence of jobs so more work gets out the door on time!