A bottleneck is a blockage in the production chain. It slows down production and limits the overall performance of a company's production flow.
Today, every industrial company wants to increase uptime, reduce operating costs and improve productivity. Bottlenecks, however, are one of the main causes of lost productivity.
What is a bottleneck operation?
A bottleneck operation is a process or step that limits the capacity of an entire system to produce at its optimal level, with the result that productivity is held back.
In the context of industrial production, an operational bottleneck is therefore a work step that limits the overall capacity of the production line.
Bottlenecks go even further: even when this work step runs at its maximum planned capacity, it still cannot process all work items quickly enough to push them on to the next steps without causing delays.
Why do bottleneck operations occur in the manufacturing plant?
Bottlenecks have various causes and generally have more serious consequences in the process industries.
In parts manufacturing and assembly, workers tend to be the factor limiting throughput at the various stages, so eliminating bottlenecks in these manufacturing processes is often a matter of people management – through appropriate staffing and task allocation.
In process plants, the throughput of most operational steps is limited by equipment capacity, not necessarily by labour. And since it is the equipment rather than the workforce that constitutes the bottleneck, throughput limitations cannot be resolved by bringing in additional labour or scheduling overtime.
Below are a few points to bear in mind when trying to understand the causes:
Most of the time, the root cause lies in equipment capacity and performance, not in staffing levels.
- Obsolete equipment, unplanned downtime and inaccurate supply chain forecasts are also contributing factors.
- Root causes also include yield losses, reliability issues and inherent capacity.
- Sometimes, non-bottlenecks can become bottlenecks due to variability in OEE factors.
- Bottlenecks can vary depending on the product range.
Key challenges in eliminating bottlenecks
- Ambiguity of root causes
The problem is not merely knowing that a bottleneck exists somewhere. The greatest challenge lies in understanding where it exists and how severe the bottleneck itself is.
- Tedious manual work
Reliance on outdated manual approaches that reduce productivity, compared with intelligent, automated AI-driven data analysis that can accelerate operations and time to insight.
- No end-to-end process visibility
It is essential to go into the field and produce a clear map of production flows (Value Stream Mapping).
Highlighting and detecting operational bottlenecks
Symptoms of an operational bottleneck on the shop floor
A checklist: watch out for these signs
- Long waiting times – Is your work delayed because you are waiting for a product, a report or additional information?
- Slow movement – Do materials move slowly from one step to the next?
- Work backlog – Is a great deal of work continually piling up at one end of a process, with not enough at the other end?
- Missed delivery deadlines – Are planned delivery times constantly being exceeded, leading to customer dissatisfaction?
- Irregular maintenance intervals – Are you unable to keep up with equipment maintenance schedules because of unexpected breakdowns?
- Unpredictable production lead times – Do you struggle to estimate production lead times accurately?
Once this analysis has been carried out, you can begin working on reducing the blocking steps – and thereby maximise the profitability of your process.
Xavier Schuster
Consultant at SXE Consulting. Industrial consulting firm based in Luxembourg, 25 years of experience in operational excellence.
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