The Bottleneck Rate of a routing is the rate (parts per unit time or tasks per unit time) of the station having the highest longterm utilization. By “longterm”, it is meant that transitory deviations, which are small with respect to the timeframe under consideration, are averaged out in the calculation of the rate. For example, when considering bottleneck rate over the course of a year, deviations small with respect to a year, such as outages due to machine failures, operator breaks, or quality problems are included in the rate calculation. However, a monthlong maintenance shutdown is removed from the time available when determining the time period for calculating the rate.