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.

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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.

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