# Task Elimination may Actually Increase Throughput Time

## TL;DR

This paper challenges the common belief that removing tasks always reduces process throughput time, demonstrating cases where it can actually increase it, and identifying conditions for guaranteed improvements.

## Contribution

It provides counterexamples and conditions under which Task Elimination, Automation, and Parallelism may not improve throughput time.

## Key findings

- Task Elimination can increase throughput time in certain scenarios.
- Automation and Parallelism may also lead to longer throughput times.
- Conditions are identified where these redesign principles guarantee throughput time improvement.

## Abstract

The well-known Task Elimination redesign principle suggests to remove unnecessary tasks from a process to improve on time and cost. Although there seems to be a general consensus that removing work can only improve the throughput time of the process, this paper shows that this is not necessarily the case by providing an example that uses plain M/M/c activities. This paper also shows that the Task Automation and Parallelism redesign principles may also lead to longer throughput times. Finally, apart from these negative results, the paper also show under which assumption these redesign principles indeed can only improve the throughput time.