How a business actually makes what it sells shapes everything else about it — job production for one-off bespoke work, flow production for identical products at scale, and lean techniques squeezing out the waste in between.
This is the first chapter of Topic 3.3, which looks at how a business actually delivers what it sells — starting with the most fundamental operational decision of all: how to produce it. The method a business chooses affects its unit costs, how quickly it can respond to orders, how skilled its workforce needs to be, and how much it can benefit from the economies of scale you met back in 3.1.7.
AQA wants you to know two contrasting methods — job production and flow production — and to understand when each genuinely makes sense for a given business, rather than treating one as simply "better" than the other. It's worth thinking of these two methods as sitting at opposite ends of a spectrum: job production trades cost efficiency for flexibility and uniqueness, while flow production trades flexibility for cost efficiency at scale. Very few real businesses sit at the absolute extreme of either end, but most lean clearly towards one side depending on what they make and who they're making it for.
Choosing between the two comes down to a small number of practical questions: how much customers are willing to pay for something unique, how large and predictable demand is, how much capital the business can invest upfront in machinery, and how skilled its available workforce is. A business making one-off wedding cakes has completely different answers to these questions than one bottling millions of cans of a soft drink each day.
The workforce implications are worth dwelling on, since they're often overlooked. A job production workshop needs relatively few staff, but each one typically needs years of training and broad, adaptable skill — a Savile Row tailor has to be able to cut, fit and finish a completely different garment for every single customer. A flow production line, by contrast, can often be staffed by workers trained for a single, narrow, repeatable task at one specific point on the line — faster and cheaper to train, but far less flexible if that particular task is no longer needed.
Lean production is an approach to manufacturing focused on minimising waste — of time, materials, money and effort — while still maintaining or improving quality. Rather than a single technique, it's a whole philosophy of constantly looking for ways to do more with less.
Making more than is currently needed, tying up money in unsold stock.
Staff or machinery standing idle between stages of production.
Faulty output that has to be scrapped or reworked, wasting materials and time.
Reducing waste like this can significantly cut a business's costs without cutting quality — often the opposite, since lean approaches tend to catch problems earlier rather than later, before more time and materials have been invested in a faulty item (an idea you'll see again in 3.3.3's discussion of quality). Lean thinking isn't limited to factories either — a lean-minded restaurant kitchen might rearrange its layout so chefs waste less time walking between stations, or a lean-minded office might redesign a form to remove duplicate information that staff previously had to enter twice.
Just in time (JIT) is a lean production technique where a business orders and receives raw materials or components only as they're needed for production, rather than holding large stockpiles of inventory in advance.
Drag each business into the production method it's most likely to use.
State two features of flow production.
Structure guide: two correctly identified features — 1 mark each, no explanation required.
State and explain two reasons why flow production might suit Barrow Biscuits' new supermarket contract better than its current job production method.
Structure guide: state a reason grounded in the case study (1 mark), explain it (1 mark) — repeated twice over.
Analyse the risks Barrow Biscuits might face from switching to Just In Time ordering for its flour and sugar supplies.
Structure guide: a single developed line of reasoning grounded in the case study (eg: relying on JIT means Barrow Biscuits will hold little spare flour or sugar stock → if a supplier delivery is delayed, the new automated production line could be forced to stop entirely → risking Barrow Biscuits missing its supply deadlines to the national supermarket chain → which could damage the new contract it has only just won).
Recommend whether Priya should switch Barrow Biscuits to flow production and Just In Time ordering for the new supermarket contract, or continue using job production. Justify your answer using the case study.
Structure guide: a "recommend" question needs a justified judgement — weigh the lower unit costs and higher volumes flow production and JIT could deliver for the new contract against the investment required and the risk of supply disruption, before reaching a clear final recommendation.