Production Line Operations Manager

Staffing (workers per station)

Fabrication 3

Assembly 2

Quality Control 3

Order arrival rate 18 /min

Line Metrics

Throughput

0 /min

WIP (units)

Avg cycle time (Little's Law)

0.0 min

Bottleneck station

—

How it works

Orders enter as raw material, then flow through three stations in series — Fabrication → Assembly → QC — each with a limited-capacity buffer (6 units) between them. Each worker at a station processes one unit at a time at a fixed base rate; a station's capacity is simply:

Station capacity (units/min) = workers × base rate

If a station finishes a unit but the downstream buffer is full, the unit — and that worker — is blocked until space opens up. This is exactly how real assembly lines back up. The whole line's throughput is capped by its slowest station (Theory of Constraints):

System throughput ≤ min(cap_Fab, cap_Asm, cap_QC, arrival rate)

Work-in-progress (WIP) — everything between arrival and shipment, including the backlog queue, buffers, and units mid-station — relates to throughput and cycle time through Little's Law, one of the most load-bearing results in operations management:

L = λ × W
WIP = Throughput × Cycle Time  →  Cycle Time = WIP / Throughput

Try starving one station (1 worker) while overstaffing the others — WIP piles up in front of the slow station and cycle time balloons even though the other two stations sit idle waiting for work, exactly the effect that drives real staffing and buffer-sizing decisions on a factory floor.

Bottleneck: —

In process Waiting in buffer Shipped

⚠ Couldn't load the 3D engineThree.js failed to load from the CDN. Check your connection and reload.

Business Operations Management Simulation