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Logistics & Supply Chain vocabulary · Supply Chain Management

Bottleneck

Meaning in logistics & supply chain, with examples

/ˈbɑːtlnek/nounCommon term

In logistics & supply chain, bottleneck means: The slowest point in a process or network, which limits how much the whole system can handle, like the narrow neck of a bottle.

In Turkish: darboğaz

How it is used

Used for machines, docks, ports, border crossings and even people or approval steps. You identify, remove or ease a bottleneck, and a problem can 'become a bottleneck'.

Example sentences

  1. Packing is our bottleneck; the pickers are always waiting for a free packing table.

  2. Customs checks at the border crossing became a bottleneck during the holiday season.

Common collocations

  • remove a bottleneck
  • capacity bottleneck
  • identify bottlenecks
  • become a bottleneck
  • supply chainThe whole network of companies, people and activities that turns raw materials into a finished product and moves it to the final customer.
  • loading dockThe area of a warehouse with doors at truck-floor height where vehicles park to be loaded or unloaded.
  • disruptionAn unexpected event that interrupts the normal flow of goods, such as a natural disaster, a strike, a port closure, a cyber attack or a supplier failure.
  • lead timeThe time between placing an order or starting a process and receiving the finished result, for example from sending a purchase order to the goods arriving.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Supply Chain Management

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