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Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Production Planning and Control

Bottleneck

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

/ˈbɑːtlnek/nounCore term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, bottleneck means: The slowest step or resource in a process, which limits the output of the whole system, just as the neck of a bottle limits how fast liquid flows out.

In Turkish: darboğaz

How it is used

Used in planning, improvement and capacity discussions. Teams identify, find, remove or eliminate a bottleneck, and work piles up in front of it. The Theory of Constraints says that improving anything other than the bottleneck does not raise total output.

Example sentences

  1. The heat treatment furnace is our bottleneck; everything else waits for it.

  2. Once we removed the bottleneck at welding, the problem moved to painting.

Common collocations

  • identify the bottleneck
  • remove a bottleneck
  • bottleneck operation
  • capacity bottleneck
  • throughputThe number of good units a process, line or plant actually produces in a period of time, such as parts per hour.
  • capacityThe maximum amount a machine, line or plant can produce in a given time, for example 1,200 units per shift.
  • constraintA limit that a solution must respect, such as available machine hours, budget or storage space. In the Theory of Constraints, the resource that limits the whole system.
  • line balancingDividing the tasks on a production line among the workstations so that each station has about the same amount of work and none is over takt time.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Production Planning and Control

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