Sets, Not Pieces: What a Kit Ships and What Is Stranded

How to read this sheet

Count in sets from the beginning and the rest follows. A made-ups floor that reports component yields will show four healthy numbers and one slightly weak one, and will not show that the weak one has cost it a quarter of a million in pieces that can no longer be sold as they were intended. The stranded column is where that money appears, and it appears against the components that ran well - which is why nobody looks for it there. Read both constraints or neither. Making good the binding component recovers only as far as the next one, and on the seeded programme that is five hundred and thirty-six sets of fourteen hundred lost. A recovery plan written against the first constraint alone will be presented, approved, executed and then disappoint, at which point the second constraint will be discovered and the exercise repeated. The sheet gives both so the plan can be written once. Buffer the unreliable component, not the expensive one. Planners protect value by carrying extra of whatever costs most, and the constraint lands on whatever yields worst regardless of price - on the seed it is the cheapest of the four main pieces. The marginal figures say plainly whether making more of it pays, and where the route is outside - embroidery, printing, a specialist finish - the answer is usually to over-issue rather than to chase the vendor. What is not modelled. Components are treated as interchangeable within their type, so a shade or lot mismatch that prevents two good pieces being set together is invisible here and is a real cause of stranding in practice. Nothing is timed: a component that will arrive next week is counted the same as one that is on the floor, and for a shipment date that distinction is everything. Sets are assumed to be sold only complete, when many houses will break a set at a discount rather than strand it - if you do, the loose value column is where that shows up and it should be honest rather than aspirational. And rework is absent: a piece that failed and can be recovered at a cost is not the same as one that is lost, and the yield entered should be the yield after whatever rework is genuinely done.