When there is a direction of flow, resources involved in order to deliver a product or a service, TIME is one of the critical factors to consider that make a difference in the process performance and should be considered in order to do a proper analysis.

For example, think about a traffic jam in a big metropolis, if I ask you how long does it take to cross the city in order to reach the airport and not miss my flight ? …what would be your answer? …most likely your answer will be… “it depends… it depends at what time is the flight, if your departure time is in the middle of the afternoon, most likely it will take you three or four times longer, had you left at night or in the early morning.

Looks obvious and simple to understand. 

Yes, but… simple and easy are not synonymous! 

In the above example, we were asked to predict the delivery time (the time to cross the city, to cover the distance to the airport) of only one product (our self) and the resource (the car) was a dedicated resource.

Nevertheless, the potential impact of the traffic jam to the accuracy of the answer, could be quite significant, to the extent that is not easy to find the right answer for our example.

What about the operations in our plant? …are the operations more or less complex in comparison to  our “single product (the car) – single route (the path to the airport)” example?

In operations, the complexity that we need to deal with, is an order of magnitude greater than our simple example.

Very often, in reality we do have multiple products with different capacity utilization impact, different amounts of people with different skills, different routes from RMs to FGs, different execution priority rules, ect …therefore, we need proper tools and methodologies in order to support us on process analysis.

This tool should be capable of considering the interactions of the above factors and the impacts of them over TIME !

The name of this tool is “Dynamic Process Model”