Bottleneck Burger

How to play

Customers come in on the left and order at the counter. Every order then travels down the line to the grill, the fryer, the drinks station and the bag station. Spend cash on more crew and faster equipment, and Kaizen points on improvements that cost attention rather than money. Kai, the shift coach, gives you one mission at a time. The kitchen keeps running while you are away, at the pace of its constraint. After the eighteen missions and a short vocabulary check, which earns a printable certificate, it keeps growing: a diner, a drive-thru, then new towns, each with a Lean score for how well you ran it.

What it teaches

Takt time and cycle time. The dashed line on the line balance chart is takt time, the pace customers set. Each bar is one station's time per order. A bar above the line cannot keep up.

The theory of constraints. The first missions walk through Eliyahu Goldratt's five focusing steps on your own line: identify the constraint, exploit it, subordinate everything else to it with a rope that paces the order counter, elevate it, and repeat when it moves. Every upgrade button shows what it would do to sales, so an upgrade away from the constraint says so.

Little's Law. The dashboard checks it live: work in process equals throughput times lead time.

DOWNTIME, the eight wastes. Waste bubbles appear in the kitchen, one letter each of Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion and Extra-processing. Tap one to fix it and read what it was costing you.

5S and 6S. Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain and Safety, bought in order, each fixing one thing: speed, wasted motion, breakdowns, variation, recurring waste and injuries.

Two order lines, one kitchen. A drive-thru adds a second order line feeding the same kitchen. The constraint then becomes the station with the most work for its capacity, which is not always the slowest one.

Process cycle efficiency. The Lean score rates flow by the share of each order's lead time spent being worked on rather than waiting.

What the game does not teach

It is a model, and a simple one. Times are shortened to seconds so things happen while you watch. The stations work in a single line, where a real kitchen makes fries and drinks alongside the burger. Work times vary at random around an average, which is true of real work, but how much they vary here is our choice, not a measurement. Real waste does not arrive labelled. And 6S as five S plus Safety is one convention among several.

We checked the game's lessons by letting a script play it. In this model, adding two baggers when the grill was the constraint left orders served in ten minutes within 5% (96 against 100). Adding one cook raised it by 67%. Turning on the rope cut the average work in process from about 39 orders to about 3 at the same throughput. Those are properties of the model, not a promise about your line.

Using it to train a team

Play it before a first lesson on flow or a kaizen event. It runs on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, needs no accounts, and sends nothing anywhere, so each player keeps their own kitchen in their own browser. When you are ready for your own numbers, the Lean Six Sigma toolkit has a takt time and line balance calculator and an OEE calculator.

Is Bottleneck Burger free?

Yes. It is free, needs no sign-up and runs in any modern browser on a phone, tablet or computer.

Does it save my progress?

Yes, in your own browser, every few seconds. Nothing is sent to us or anyone else. Clearing this site's data in your browser resets it, and so does Start over in the game's menu.

How long does it take?

A script that plays as fast as it can reaches Lean master, the eighteenth mission, in about 20 to 25 minutes of play. People reading the coach as they go take longer. After that the game keeps growing: a diner, a drive-thru, then new towns.

Is the certificate a qualification?

No. It records that you finished the eighteen missions and passed the ten-question vocabulary check, in your own browser. It is a learning record, not an assessed qualification, and Highland Willow does not verify who played. Your name stays in your browser and on the page you print.

Is there a leaderboard?

Each location you run earns a Lean score out of 1,000 for how well it was managed, not how big it got: constraint focus, flow, service, quality, waste response and safety. Your top ten stay in your own browser. A shared board needs a server that checks every score before accepting it, and that is not built yet.

What is the theory of constraints?

A management method set out in Eliyahu Goldratt's 1984 novel The Goal. Every system has one constraint that limits its output, so improvement belongs there first. Its five focusing steps are identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate and repeat.

What does DOWNTIME stand for?

The eight wastes of Lean: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion and Extra-processing.