Why throughput is the wrong place to start
Why throughput is the wrong place to start
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Most automation projects start with a throughput target. “We need to do 10,000 cases an hour.” That number gets passed around as if it were holy.
It’s not.
What you actually need to know first
Before you can size anything, you need to know:
- What changes about the business in five years? Throughput is a function of the business model, not the warehouse.
- What’s the unit economics target? A system that hits the throughput but blows the cost-per-unit isn’t a win.
- Who’s going to operate it? A perfect mechanical design with the wrong labor model fails on day one.
Most projects we see jump to the conveyor layout in week one. The most successful projects we see don’t draw a single line of layout until week four — and they save themselves six months of rework downstream.
The full module
This is just a teaser. The full module on throughput modeling, peak factor selection, and capacity-vs-demand framing is available to subscribers.
If you’ve been a part of the industry for a while, you’ve seen exactly the failure mode this article describes. We’ve got 40 more like it inside the vault.