Traduccion.

It should be noted that if we increase the daily capacity of the other departments of the adjudication system without increasing the capacity of the judges to handle the caseload, the throughput of the whole system will not change. On the other hand, increasing the number of cases handled by judges will increase system throughput. The bottleneck, the judges, dictates the throughput for the wholesystem and should be treated as the organizational “goose that lays golden eggs”. An hour lost in the bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system.
In the court system, the judges are permanent bottlenecks. There will always be more demand for their services than they can supply. They are a scarce and expensive resource, sometimes having unique expertise and knowledge. Furthermore, addingjudges to a judicial system is quite complicated. It is not just a budgetary constraint; sometimes it requires amendments to legislation, which are difficult to achieve.
3.3.2 Market constraint
A market constraint arises in a situation where the market demand is less than the output capacity of each resource. This is not the case here. As indicated above, the judicial system typically suffers froman overflow of cases.
3.3.3 Policy constraint
A policy constraint is the adoption of an inappropriate policy that limits system performance and goal achievement and that may even act to counter the organizational goal. This is also known as “policy failure”.
A policy constraint prevents the system from achieving its goal. The inappropriate policy is a system constraint. For example, we foundthat some judges tend to write unnecessarily long opinions. When asked about the grounds for this, they claimed that in the promotion process, their judgments are reviewed, and experience apparently showed that long and extensive judgments were given higher evaluations. It should be noted that lengthy reasoned opinions are, historically, a phenomenon inherent in the Anglo-American systems.Adjudication systems based upon the European-continental systems are much shorter and at times even quite concise, yet this does not affect the effectiveness of the courts.
3.3.4 Dummy constraint
A dummy constraint is a situation where the system bottleneck is a very cheap resource relative to other resources in the system. This is a situation where system throughput is constrained because of a resourcewhose cost is marginal. In the court system we found that a very cheap resource-a typist, for example- may cause, in many cases, a severe reduction of throughput. Judges are then required to type their opinions, a very time consuming activity for most judges, in particular since they are not experienced and fast typists. Other dummy constraints are the limitation on the administrative assistanceto judges, such as secretarial assistance.
Shortages of phone lines, fax machines, copying paper, printers, etc., are all dummy constraints of the system. These are relatively cheap resources compared to the costs of other resources and compared to the potential effect of decreased throughput.
3.4. Decide how to exploit the system´s constraint
The step of exploiting and utilizing the constraintmeans doing much more with the existing resources. That is, extracting significant additional throughput by focused management of the bottleneck resources: In our case-the judges.
Improvement through exploitation can be achieved relatively quickly and is, therefore, the most realistic improvement for the short term. Exploitation is performed in two dimensions: Efficiency and effectiveness.
Inparallel, we must eliminate policy and dummy constraints.
* Efficiency means increasing bottleneck utilization to as close to 100% as possible.
* Effectiveness means that, as the bottleneck cannot supply the entire demand, one must decide on the product or service mix of the bottleneck.

3.4.1. Effectiveness
As the bottleneck(the judges) cannot supply the entire demand, one must decide...