Unblocking Bottlenecks
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Consider this scenario: You own a trucking
company, and you've recently had problems in the delivery process
for one of your clients.
The loading at their factory goes smoothly,
but once your trucks arrive at the client's warehouse, efficiency
seems to fall apart.
The trucks typically wait six to eight hours before
workers unload the cargo.
Every minute that your trucks are parked
and waiting costs your company revenue.
You investigate to find out why the trucks are
forced to wait, and you discover something surprising: The reason
they wait is because no one notifies the warehouse in advance
of their arrival. As a result, when a truck arrives, the forklift
that's needed for unloading is often being used for another task. So
your truck has to wait until the forklift is free.
Now you begin to wonder why the warehouse isn't
notified, as it should be, that trucks are on their way. You
investigate more and learn that the person who used to call the
warehouse left the company a few months ago, and the task wasn't
reassigned. So you delegate the phone call to another team member,
and you persuade the warehouse to purchase a second forklift – and
your problem is solved.
This bottleneck was pretty easy to fix. But have
you ever discovered a bottleneck in your business processes? These
can be harder to resolve, mostly because they're harder to
identify.
What is a Bottleneck?
A bottleneck in a process occurs when input
comes in faster than the next step can use it to create output. The
term compares assets (information, materials, products, man-hours)
with water. When water is poured out of a bottle, it has to pass
through the bottle's neck, or opening. The wider the bottle's neck,
the more water (input/assets) you can pour out. The smaller, or
narrower, the bottle's neck, the less you can pour out – and you end
up with a back-up, or "bottleneck."
There are two main types of bottlenecks:
Short-term bottlenecks – These are caused by temporary problems. A
good example is when key team members become ill or go on vacation.
No one else is qualified to take over their projects, which causes a
backlog in their work until they return.
Long-term bottlenecks – These occur all the time. An example would
be when a company's month-end reporting process is delayed every
month, because one person has to complete a series of time-consuming
tasks – and he can't even start until he has the final month-end
figures.
Identifying and fixing bottlenecks is highly important. They can
cause a lot of problems in terms of lost revenue, dissatisfied
customers, wasted time, poor-quality products or services, and high
stress in team members.
How to Identify Bottlenecks
Identifying bottlenecks in manufacturing is usually pretty easy. On
an assembly line, you see when products pile up at a certain point.
In business processes, however, they can be harder to find.
Start with yourself. Is there a routine or situation that regularly
causes stress in your day? These frustrations can actually be a
significant indicator that a bottleneck exists somewhere.
For example, imagine that you're responsible for reviewing a report
that another team member creates each week. Once you're done, you
give it to another team member, who has to post the report on your
company's intranet. Due to your workload, however, the report often
sits on your desk for hours – so the next person down the line
sometimes has to stay later at the end of the day to post it on
time. This causes a lot of stress for you as well as your colleague.
In this scenario, you're the bottleneck.
Here are some other signs of bottlenecks:
Long wait times – For example, your work is delayed because you're
waiting for a product, a report, or more information. Or materials
spend time waiting between steps of a business or manufacturing
process.
Backlogged work – There's too much work piled up at one end, and
not enough at the other end.
High stress levels.
Two tools are useful in helping you identify bottlenecks:
1. Flow Charts
Use a flow chart to help you identify where bottlenecks are
occurring. Flow charts break down a system by detailing every step
in the process in an easy-to-follow diagrammatic flow. Once you map out a process, it's much easier to see
where there might be a problem. Sit down and identify each step that
your process needs to function well.
For example, in the trucking scenario we mentioned earlier, a flow
chart might look like this:
Step 1 – Goods are manufactured at the factory.
Step 2 – Goods are loaded onto the truck.
Step 3 – The warehouse is notified about the truck's arrival time.
Step 4 – The warehouse schedules a forklift for the expected arrival time.
Step 5 – The truck arrives at the warehouse, and unloading starts.
In this case, the delay occurred because Steps 3 and 4 were missing,
and this led to a long wait between Steps 2 and 5. Creating the flow
chart before investigating the problem would have helped you quickly
see where your process broke down.
2. The Five Whys Technique
The Five Whys technique can also help you identify how to unblock
your bottleneck.
To start, identify the problem you want to address. Then, working
backward, ask yourself why this problem is occurring. Keep asking
yourself "Why?" at each step, until you reach the root cause.
Consider our trucking example again. Go back to the beginning, and
imagine that you have no idea why the trucks are delayed.
Trucks are forced to wait for hours at the warehouse.
Why?
Because the forklift isn't ready to unload the trucks when they
arrive.
Why isn't the forklift ready?
Because there's only one forklift, and it's used for other things.
The warehouse doesn't know the trucks are arriving, so the forklift
isn't scheduled to unload cargo.
Why doesn't the warehouse know the trucks are coming?
Because no one has called to tell them.
Why has no one called the warehouse?
Because the team member whose job was to call the warehouse left
months ago, and no one else was assigned to make the calls.
And there's the solution. You've identified the root cause: a
missing team member. The easy fix is to delegate the task to someone
else.
By working backward and identifying the root cause, you can clearly
see what you need to change to fix the problem.
How to Unblock Bottlenecks
You have two basic options for unblocking your bottleneck:
Increase the efficiency of the bottleneck step.
Decrease input to the bottleneck step.
In our trucking example, the clear solution was to increase
efficiency by notifying the warehouse. How you might increase
efficiency in other situations will depend greatly on the nature of
the process concerned, but here are some general ideas:
Ensure that whatever is being fed into the bottleneck is free of
defects. By doing this, you ensure that you're not wasting the valuable bottleneck resource
by using it to process material that will later be discarded.
Remove activities from the bottleneck process that could be done
by other people or machinery.
Assign the most productive team members and technology to the
bottleneck process.
Add capacity in the bottleneck process.
For more on how to increase the efficiency of processes, see our
article on Kaizen: Gaining the Full Benefits of Continuous
Improvement .
The other option, decreasing input, may at first sound silly. But if
one part of a process has the potential to produce more output than
you ultimately need or can manage, it's an appropriate response. You
may have a situation where you keep increasing the amount of
work-in-progress inventory immediately after a step that's working
too efficiently.
For example, speed cameras can "catch" a large number of drivers who
exceed the speed limit. However, each speed violation has to be
processed, and this incurs a cost. The cameras can catch far more
drivers than the processing departments can handle. So, many cameras
are programmed to identify only those drivers who go a certain
amount over the speed limit, or to operate only at certain times of
day or certain days of the week. As a result, the number of inputs
to the system is reduced to the level that it can process.
Key Points
Bottlenecks can cause major problems for any company, and
identifying their root causes is critical. Look for the typical
signs of bottlenecks – such as backlogged work, waiting (by people,
materials, or paperwork), and high stress relating to a task or
process. To make sure you identify the root cause (and not just one of
the effects), use a Flow Chart or the Five Whys technique.
To explore process balancing and
resolving bottlenecks in more detail, read " The Goal " by Eliyahu M Goldratt and Jeff Cox.
Apply This to Your Life
Are there bottlenecks in any of your processes at work? Do
you produce things that sit in a colleague's inbox for hours
or days before they're processed? Do things sit in your
inbox for days because you're too busy? Do you often wait to
receive materials, reports, or pieces of information from
colleagues, and do these delay tasks that you need to
complete? Or are you always late sending things to your
colleagues?
For each bottleneck situation, identify who – or what –
the bottleneck is. Is it you, or someone else, or even an
automatic process?
Then determine if the process would flow better if inputs
to the bottleneck step were reduced, or if efficiency were
increased. If the problem is efficiency, how can you
improve? Read our article on leverage for ideas on doing this.
Tags:
Problem Solving, Skills
company, and you've recently had problems in the delivery process
for one of your clients.
The loading at their factory goes smoothly,
but once your trucks arrive at the client's warehouse, efficiency
seems to fall apart.
The trucks typically wait six to eight hours before
workers unload the cargo.
Every minute that your trucks are parked
and waiting costs your company revenue.
You investigate to find out why the trucks are
forced to wait, and you discover something surprising: The reason
they wait is because no one notifies the warehouse in advance
of their arrival. As a result, when a truck arrives, the forklift
that's needed for unloading is often being used for another task. So
your truck has to wait until the forklift is free.
Now you begin to wonder why the warehouse isn't
notified, as it should be, that trucks are on their way. You
investigate more and learn that the person who used to call the
warehouse left the company a few months ago, and the task wasn't
reassigned. So you delegate the phone call to another team member,
and you persuade the warehouse to purchase a second forklift – and
your problem is solved.
This bottleneck was pretty easy to fix. But have
you ever discovered a bottleneck in your business processes? These
can be harder to resolve, mostly because they're harder to
identify.
What is a Bottleneck?
A bottleneck in a process occurs when input
comes in faster than the next step can use it to create output. The
term compares assets (information, materials, products, man-hours)
with water. When water is poured out of a bottle, it has to pass
through the bottle's neck, or opening. The wider the bottle's neck,
the more water (input/assets) you can pour out. The smaller, or
narrower, the bottle's neck, the less you can pour out – and you end
up with a back-up, or "bottleneck."
There are two main types of bottlenecks:
Short-term bottlenecks – These are caused by temporary problems. A
good example is when key team members become ill or go on vacation.
No one else is qualified to take over their projects, which causes a
backlog in their work until they return.
Long-term bottlenecks – These occur all the time. An example would
be when a company's month-end reporting process is delayed every
month, because one person has to complete a series of time-consuming
tasks – and he can't even start until he has the final month-end
figures.
Identifying and fixing bottlenecks is highly important. They can
cause a lot of problems in terms of lost revenue, dissatisfied
customers, wasted time, poor-quality products or services, and high
stress in team members.
How to Identify Bottlenecks
Identifying bottlenecks in manufacturing is usually pretty easy. On
an assembly line, you see when products pile up at a certain point.
In business processes, however, they can be harder to find.
Start with yourself. Is there a routine or situation that regularly
causes stress in your day? These frustrations can actually be a
significant indicator that a bottleneck exists somewhere.
For example, imagine that you're responsible for reviewing a report
that another team member creates each week. Once you're done, you
give it to another team member, who has to post the report on your
company's intranet. Due to your workload, however, the report often
sits on your desk for hours – so the next person down the line
sometimes has to stay later at the end of the day to post it on
time. This causes a lot of stress for you as well as your colleague.
In this scenario, you're the bottleneck.
Here are some other signs of bottlenecks:
Long wait times – For example, your work is delayed because you're
waiting for a product, a report, or more information. Or materials
spend time waiting between steps of a business or manufacturing
process.
Backlogged work – There's too much work piled up at one end, and
not enough at the other end.
High stress levels.
Two tools are useful in helping you identify bottlenecks:
1. Flow Charts
Use a flow chart to help you identify where bottlenecks are
occurring. Flow charts break down a system by detailing every step
in the process in an easy-to-follow diagrammatic flow. Once you map out a process, it's much easier to see
where there might be a problem. Sit down and identify each step that
your process needs to function well.
For example, in the trucking scenario we mentioned earlier, a flow
chart might look like this:
Step 1 – Goods are manufactured at the factory.
Step 2 – Goods are loaded onto the truck.
Step 3 – The warehouse is notified about the truck's arrival time.
Step 4 – The warehouse schedules a forklift for the expected arrival time.
Step 5 – The truck arrives at the warehouse, and unloading starts.
In this case, the delay occurred because Steps 3 and 4 were missing,
and this led to a long wait between Steps 2 and 5. Creating the flow
chart before investigating the problem would have helped you quickly
see where your process broke down.
2. The Five Whys Technique
The Five Whys technique can also help you identify how to unblock
your bottleneck.
To start, identify the problem you want to address. Then, working
backward, ask yourself why this problem is occurring. Keep asking
yourself "Why?" at each step, until you reach the root cause.
Consider our trucking example again. Go back to the beginning, and
imagine that you have no idea why the trucks are delayed.
Trucks are forced to wait for hours at the warehouse.
Why?
Because the forklift isn't ready to unload the trucks when they
arrive.
Why isn't the forklift ready?
Because there's only one forklift, and it's used for other things.
The warehouse doesn't know the trucks are arriving, so the forklift
isn't scheduled to unload cargo.
Why doesn't the warehouse know the trucks are coming?
Because no one has called to tell them.
Why has no one called the warehouse?
Because the team member whose job was to call the warehouse left
months ago, and no one else was assigned to make the calls.
And there's the solution. You've identified the root cause: a
missing team member. The easy fix is to delegate the task to someone
else.
By working backward and identifying the root cause, you can clearly
see what you need to change to fix the problem.
How to Unblock Bottlenecks
You have two basic options for unblocking your bottleneck:
Increase the efficiency of the bottleneck step.
Decrease input to the bottleneck step.
In our trucking example, the clear solution was to increase
efficiency by notifying the warehouse. How you might increase
efficiency in other situations will depend greatly on the nature of
the process concerned, but here are some general ideas:
Ensure that whatever is being fed into the bottleneck is free of
defects. By doing this, you ensure that you're not wasting the valuable bottleneck resource
by using it to process material that will later be discarded.
Remove activities from the bottleneck process that could be done
by other people or machinery.
Assign the most productive team members and technology to the
bottleneck process.
Add capacity in the bottleneck process.
For more on how to increase the efficiency of processes, see our
article on Kaizen: Gaining the Full Benefits of Continuous
Improvement .
The other option, decreasing input, may at first sound silly. But if
one part of a process has the potential to produce more output than
you ultimately need or can manage, it's an appropriate response. You
may have a situation where you keep increasing the amount of
work-in-progress inventory immediately after a step that's working
too efficiently.
For example, speed cameras can "catch" a large number of drivers who
exceed the speed limit. However, each speed violation has to be
processed, and this incurs a cost. The cameras can catch far more
drivers than the processing departments can handle. So, many cameras
are programmed to identify only those drivers who go a certain
amount over the speed limit, or to operate only at certain times of
day or certain days of the week. As a result, the number of inputs
to the system is reduced to the level that it can process.
Key Points
Bottlenecks can cause major problems for any company, and
identifying their root causes is critical. Look for the typical
signs of bottlenecks – such as backlogged work, waiting (by people,
materials, or paperwork), and high stress relating to a task or
process. To make sure you identify the root cause (and not just one of
the effects), use a Flow Chart or the Five Whys technique.
To explore process balancing and
resolving bottlenecks in more detail, read " The Goal " by Eliyahu M Goldratt and Jeff Cox.
Apply This to Your Life
Are there bottlenecks in any of your processes at work? Do
you produce things that sit in a colleague's inbox for hours
or days before they're processed? Do things sit in your
inbox for days because you're too busy? Do you often wait to
receive materials, reports, or pieces of information from
colleagues, and do these delay tasks that you need to
complete? Or are you always late sending things to your
colleagues?
For each bottleneck situation, identify who – or what –
the bottleneck is. Is it you, or someone else, or even an
automatic process?
Then determine if the process would flow better if inputs
to the bottleneck step were reduced, or if efficiency were
increased. If the problem is efficiency, how can you
improve? Read our article on leverage for ideas on doing this.
