single-piece flow

is the idea that, owing to the surprising power of small batches, it is faster, for example to fold then stuff one hundred envelopes than to first fold one hundred letters and then stuff the envelopes.

The one envelope at a time approach is called 'single-piece flow' in lean manufacturing. It works because of the surprising power of small batches. When we do work that proceeds in stages, the 'batch size' refers to how much work moves from one stage to the next at a time. For example, if we were stuffing one hundred envelopes, the intuitive way to do it folding one hundred letters at a time would have a batch size of one hundred. Single-piece flow is so named because it has a batch size of one.

single piece flow, n.All

single piece flow