Operations / Lean
Queue Time (Lead-Time Decomposition)
The part of manufacturing lead time a job spends waiting in line, not being worked, almost always the largest slice, and the one nobody measures.
The fork, why two teams get different numbers
Manufacturing lead time decomposes into queue + setup + run + wait + move, and the forks are which buckets get merged and which count as "value." APICS distinguishes QUEUE (waiting BEFORE an operation) from WAIT (waiting AFTER, for the move), most dashboards collapse them, losing where the delay actually is.
In the Metric Library
- The full fork, both definitions worked all the way through
- The trap that makes the number lie, on a real export
- Every formula variant, spelled out
- The reconciliation anchor, what to tie it to and when to refuse
Reference: APICS/ASCM manufacturing lead-time elements · Lean value-stream (VA/NVA) convention · Little's Law