Batch production in action - cricket bats

Forget those boring textbook examples of batch production - loaves of bread, school dinners, building a house etc etc. Here is a great pictorial example of batch production in action…

This lovely image gallery in the The Guardian takes us through the production stages of a cricket bat.

The process starts with the felling of willow trees (raw materials & primary production in action too!) followed by a series of stages which progressively reduce the size of the cut wood and grade the raw materials according to their quality.

The finished product for the featured business (JS Wright) is a graded willow bat which is then branded by the leading cricket bat “manufacturers” around the world.