The goal for any business/plant/industry is to look for ways to improve its processes and increase its efficiency. As their operations grow, they tend to face a lot of challenges that affect their operational efficiency and productivity.

A significant challenge is in identifying and managing bottlenecks within production or service workflows and processes.

What’s a bottleneck?

A bottleneck is any constraint in the process that limits the process’s productivity. These are the slowest or most restrictive parts of a system, process, or workflow that hinder productivity, cause slow growth, and negatively impact the bottom line/output.

Taking an example, imagine you’re running a factory that produces car parts. The factory has several production lines, each of which has its machines and workers. But, despite having enough machines and workers, the overall production of the factory is slow, bottlenecking your production and revenues.

Remedying the situation will likely call for you to conduct a Bottleneck Analysis (BA).

What is a bottleneck analysis?

Bottleneck analysis is a method used to identify the limiting factors or constraints that are slowing down the performance of a process or system. It helps you understand the root cause of the inefficiencies, how to find them, fix them, and prevent them from re-occurring, making an improvement to the overall efficiency.

Locating these inefficiencies is more like a doctor diagnosing a patient so he can recommend the right treatment, but now, the process remains the only difference is that it’s done by an engineer.

Results from the analysis will determine the types, number, and locations of the bottlenecks with proper solutions. The process likely involves some studies, design, and simulations, ending up to recommendations.

Jumping back to our example of the car parts factory, through bottleneck analysis, the factory management can identify that a limiting factor is a particular machine that is taking longer to complete its task than the others.

By upgrading this machine, the factory can now improve its overall production speed.

Why should you conduct bottleneck analysis?

Bottleneck analysis is a key aspect in any process analysis. The analysis offers numerous benefits to businesses’ operations, with some of the benefits being,

• Addressing bottlenecks leads to increased productivity, as the most time-consuming or resource-intensive parts of the process are optimized or eliminated altogether.
• It streamlines your process, making it more efficient and continuous.
• Reduce production costs on the outputs.

It can be conducted by a business analyst, an operational excellence consultant, or by us (by simply contacting us).

At the simplest level, a bottleneck analysis typically involves a series of steps from: System Identification, Mapping the Process, Identifying the Bottleneck, Analysis, Develop & Implement, to Continuous Monitoring.

Today, there are a number of software solutions automating the analysis and identification of operational bottlenecks, depending on your objective, i.e., process discovery, tasking, or intelligent process and AI, where the analysis can be done faster and more easily.