Pratt & Whitney turbine blade manufacturing constraint

Positive example of theory of constraints. The $200M broaching machine is a genuine single bottleneck; cellular manufacturing reorganized around it. 40% of P&W profits from 20% of business (vanes).

There are times though, to get back to theory of constraints, when it works. I've got two examples. [Tom passes around a turbine vane.] This is a turbine vane I got at a Pratt & Whitney plant in New Haven, Connecticut. This plant makes vanes for the engines. Forty percent of Pratt & Whitney's profits come from twenty percent of their business of making vanes. The rest of it's making the whole engine, but the vanes are only twenty percent of the engine and they get forty percent of the profits from it. So there's a lot of technology in making that vane.