Fable
The long kiln sends a batch of bowls forward in stages
The porcelain workshop had to rush out a batch of large vases, and the process—from kneading clay and throwing to drying, glazing, and firing—had no step to spare. As orders piled up, the craftsmen each did everything from start to finish, semi-finished pieces filled the workshop, yet the kiln was often waiting for clay blanks.
The workshop owner kept pushing for speed, which only made the preceding and following processes more uneven. The old kiln worker split the long task into fixed workstations: the front section continuously produced blanks, the middle section dried them at a steady rhythm, and the back section took over glazing and firing. Each batch of bottles was numbered and passed forward in sequence.
At the very start of work, the final stages still had idle waiting because the first batch had not yet gone through the entire line; when one segment was too slow, the people behind it also sat idle. The kiln workers then adjusted the quantity delivered each time and the staffing of each segment, so that different batches could stop at different stages at the same time.
Each bottle still had to go through all the steps, but the workshop's total output rose. Only by dividing long tasks into consecutive stages and letting small batches of work advance in an interleaved way can waiting be reduced.