Managing Bottlenecks

Read this article. It details a bottleneck analysis and proposes a bottleneck management process. From the reading, can you describe why bottlenecks occur in a production process?

Data collection

The data required for simulation was collected through direct observation of the assembly line. The standard times had been updated four years previously, and there had been changes within the company in production, in the variability in material or parts used to assemble the vehicles, and in the methods used. State-of-the-art tooling that takes much less time to perform tasks was now available, and new models had been introduced to the assembly line. It was against this backdrop that we decided to conduct time studies. We observed the assembly operators, and recorded the operation sequences and potential break points on the standard operations sheet. Table 2 shows a summary of typical operations during the assembly of a truck.

We split the operations into elements, and timed the individual elements as many times as was necessary till the end of the operation. Table 3 shows a summary of assembly times for five key vehicle models.

Table 3: Vehicle assembly times at stations (in minutes)

Work Station	TGS	HB	TGM	CLA	VW	Average number of workers
1	28	30	24	64	19	4
2	27	23	28	43	21	3
3	27	32	37	50	26	4
4	27	23	30	26	22	3
5	36	25	31	41	41	4
6	24	18	23	28	16	3
7	39	32	31	58	34	5
8	34	32	29	36	14	4
9	30	34	34	31	28	4
10	12	12	12	12	12	2
11	27	29	18	25	23	3
12	46	22	33	42	12	4
13	41	41	41	41	41	5
14	27	67	47	48	46	6
15	31	21	24	22	23	3
16	30	30	30	30	30	4