Production flow · The flow measure · Element

The throughput

Units completed per period, which must not fall when flow improves.

The part

What it is

Flow improvements that reduce throughput have optimised the wrong thing, and holding both measures together is what catches that.

Throughput is set by the constraint, so it should be unchanged by improvements elsewhere — which is itself a useful check.

The smallest level

The attributes it carries

Each attribute is one of the framework’s shared types. What a date is, and how it is written, is defined once for the whole model — the note here says what it means in this particular place.