Bottleneck In A Manufacturing Industry

Bottleneck is anything which will restrict the flow.

In a manufacturing industry bottleneck will be an operation and flow means the flow of material or information.

Watch Training Video at the end of this article.

Also Download an excel template from the end of the article.

Suppose there is an assembly line with 4 operations A, B, C and D with cycle times 7, 5, 9 and 3 minutes respectively. While the assembly line is running we can see the piling up of work in process inventory before the operation C. Because, the operator at the operation C is not able to finish his work as fast as others, since the cycle time of the operation C is higher than others. Here, the operation C is restricting the flow of the material and operation C is the bottleneck of this assembly line.

So in general we can say the operation with highest cycle time will be the bottleneck of a particular assembly line.

Importance of Bottleneck

This bottleneck will guide the output of the assembly line. So in order to increase the output of the assembly line, we must reduce the cycle time of the bottleneck operation.

Thank You for reading.

Also please have a look at the article which describes 4 types of time.

If you know any subject that can be related to manufacturing industry or industrial engineering, you can earn some income by becoming article contributor of this website. For knowing more about it, please visit Join us page.

You don’t need to have any experience in article writing, just knowledge on the subject is needed.

Also you can know more about our team of article contributors by visiting the about us page.

Learn Bottleneck analysis from this YouTube Video

Download Bottleneck analysis Excel Template

Please note only premium members will be able to download the template.

Enter operations is B column and corresponding Cycle time in seconds in C Column. The UPH of the operation will automatically calculated in the D column. Enter required UPH in the D2 cell. If the UPH of each operation is less than the required UPH, it will show red otherwise it will be Green. Focus on the operations which shows red and reduce the cycle time, which are the bottleneck to achieve the required UPH.