The low production efficiency of suppliers is the main bottleneck in the real production and operation progress of build-to-order supply chain(BTO supply chain). Two prominent problems are long response time of the whole supply chain and high work-in-progress (WIP) inventory level. An optimized response time strategy of BTO supply chain based on bottleneck control is proposed, which is expanded by the queue theory. The effects of parameters on both the level of WIP and the response time of the entire supply chain, such as order quantity in the queue, the waiting order quantity, production utilization and the probability distribution in the system etc., were analyzed through numerical examples. Calculation results show that the bottleneckbased workload control is effective to control the level of WIP while to shorten the response time of the whole BTO supply chain at the same time.