What is the bottleneck in your company?

It is important to understand that in every production process there are phases or stages that make it up, therefore when we speak of BOTTLENECK we are referring to one of those stages of the production process that produce a "stop" or slow down the process.

In other words, bottlenecks are those activities that reduce the production process, increasing waiting times and decreasing productivity, which generally creates an increase in the final cost of the product. To avoid this decrease in productivity, companies (in many, the Supply Chain Management) must identify the main causes that can generate it. Among many others, we can name:

• Lack of organization and/or process planning.
• Human error or lack of qualified personnel.
• Technical flaws.
• Not working with a methodology that anticipates this type of unforeseen event and that sets guidelines to solve the problem.
• Not having a system for production analysis.
• Problems with suppliers.
• Problems in internal communication.

So, we talk about a bottleneck referring to a failure of the production process, which causes a considerable drop in efficiency and productivity at a general level. Due to the problems that this entails, the stages that precede the process will suffer a delay that will affect not only the quality of the service or product but will also generate a considerable increase in production costs.

It is extremely positive to identify a bottleneck in a production process, since a company that is well managed and has competent personnel who follow a methodology that allows it to deal with incidents in its production system, will normally end up offering better quality service or product than what it had been offering. In addition, bottlenecks are, in a way, internal tests for the company's development, and if they are solved on time, they will considerably optimize the production process, and thus improve productivity in the long term, making the company more competitive and more prepared to flow with the process to adapt to the market.

The first thing to make it easy to identify a fault in the system is for the company to work using the principles of an agile methodology or an effective work framework. 

Keep in mind that if you cannot easily identify the moment or place where the production process is suffering from a bottleneck, you will never be able to solve it and your company will remain unaware of the problems it is really experiencing. As a consequence, you will end up offering a poor quality product/service and you will surely lose competitiveness.

When your company detects a bottleneck, you should paralyze the entire production chain and allocate resources to solve this problem so that the different stages of the process do not suffer problems derived from this inconvenience. This is because if once the bottleneck has been identified, the production chain continues, the problem will continue to grow and, in a short time, that faulty stage will cause great problems for the survival of the company.

In general, to solve a bottleneck, some steps must be followed that you will have to accommodate according to the methodology used by your company:

1. Identify and define the problem.
2. Recognize the characteristics of the problem through the observation of the process.
3. Search for the main causes.
4. Planning of the possible actions that should be carried out to eliminate the causes of the problem.
5. Analysis of the effectiveness of the activities carried out to solve the problem.
6. The standardization. Modification of the process, to permanently eliminate the causes of the failure.
7. Review of activities and continuous planning of future work processes.

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