The name Simplified Drum-Buffer-Rope (SDBR) was given to the TOC solution for managing production environment that does not have a bottleneck or any severe CCR – Capacity Constraint Resource.

In SDBR the Drum is given to the market. It is assumed that there is enough capacity to fulfill the market demand in full within the delivery times that have been agreed with customers. The Drum is the Shipping Plan.

The Drum is the list of Customers’ Orders (COs) arranged in time sequence according to their delivery dates (DD).

A Time Buffer is assigned to the Customer Order which is the elapsed time for the WO to be processed in the production area. In SDBR this Buffer is called Production Buffer and it is assigned to all the parts that are necessary for the customer’s order.

The Rope mechanism is used for Material Release and is determined by deducting the Production Buffer from the DD.

Source: Oded Cohen and Jelena Fedurko, Theory of Constraints Fundamentals, 2012