How to identify the bottleneck in your operations?

Are you fully aware of the bottleneck in your operations?

It could be the sorting, washing, the dryers or the ironers and so on.

The bottleneck basically defines the throughput of your plant.

Once you have identified your bottleneck you can tackle it in order to increase the throughput and productivity.

With that said one of the main purposes of a plant manager is to care about the bottleneck.

“An optimized bottleneck leads to an efficient plant.”

?? This will help your analysis:

To identify the bottleneck in your current operations, first draw the process (roughly) on paper.

? Then ask yourself some of the following questions:

? How long does it take to get to each customer and back?

? What is the output of every machine?

Schedule yourself time to study the processes. Whether you are the plant manager, managing director, or executive it's important to spend enough time to observe each process.

As a side benefit, you will collect a lot of data and information and your employees will also see that you truly care about them and the success of the plant.

Make a full list of all sorts of improvements you identify in the process.

Once you are clear about the bottleneck start to implement improvements on the bottleneck only. That will have the fastest impact to stabilize the process and improve the output.

Ensure to brief your best people about the situation at the bottleneck. Every implemented initiative should be about the bottleneck first.

Feel free to share your insights and experiences on increasing productivity in the comments below.

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