Bottleneck

Bottlenecks in your process are the pacemakers of existing processes. These means if you tackle your bottlenecks in your process chain, it will have a direct impact on your cash flow.

A Bottleneck in a process chain requires the longest lead time of operations, A typical indicator for a bottleneck station is a upstream increased inventory or Work in Progress. The bottleneck is therefore the weakest link in the chain.

If you are running improvement or KAIZEN Workshops on your bottleneck station the upstream or downstream process steps will never be above 100% of performance. If so the bottleneck station changed to a different process step.

Bottlenecks are great to improve!

The potential of removing bottlenecks is unbelievable high, if you miss the chance to tackle the potential of bottlenecks in order to increase your throughput you are missing the chance to increase your performance and exceed customer demand/expectations. It is quite simple – the cost per hour of a bottleneck station can be seen as the loss of one hour of your complete process chain (e.g. production line) incl. the loss of parts not produced.

The whole deal is about increasing the throughput of your assembly line, to use machines efficiently combined with optimized operator working steps to increase the profitability of the assembly in total. Don’t make the mistake and focus only on the cost reduction part of it think and don’t be fooled by thinking in partial optimization.

To bring it to the point: In manufacturing, bottlenecks are continuously slowing down the whole assembly line. Focusing on permanent existing bottlenecks will sustainable improve the performance of the whole process chain and effect even other areas.