It's now time to decide which limit to begin with. Without running for a time, it's very hard to predict what would be the best balance between throughput and lead-time. Your first decision is about how important quick time to market is for you. If it is very important, we suggest you start with tough (low) limits. In practice, that means that the normal is that people are waiting for work instead of work waiting for people to take care of it. In other words, you want the next work station/process step to be ready to start working when you are ready with your part of the work.

If time to market is not very important, you can start with wider limits and allow some buffers to build up between process steps just to make sure everybody almost always has something to do.

The reasons for having queues between process steps is to have a buffer to handle variation caused either by different work capacity, like in the match game previously, or different amounts of...