Have you heard about bottlenecks? Of course, apart from its literal meaning, the term is used to represent a rate limiting step of a process, with many steps, or sub-process involved.
There are many examples of bottlenecks of life
Imagine you are a driver, a junction in your journey, a color light with traffic, can be a bottleneck.
If you are climbing the mount Everest, the Hillary step can be a bottleneck. And if it is the K2 which is the second tallest mountain in the world that you are climbing, the most difficult part of the climb is actually named the 'Bottleneck.'
Of course, if you are working in a factory, Assembly line of the factory can have bottlenecks associated with it.
If you work with chemistry, a rate limiting reaction can be a bottleneck to the whole process of a chemical reaction.
Even if you study biology, you will find 'population bottlenecks' where the population of a species is drastically reduced by some cause like a disease and a natural disaster.
If you watch wildlife videos there will be bottlenecks where crocodiles hunt wildebeest who attempt to cross the river.
It is important to identify these bottlenecks in any process, if we want to improve productivity. Especially in assembly lines which were popularized during the industrial revolution, identifying as well as finding the true cause was utmost important.
As an example, in early stages of #Fordcars company assembly line, the rate limiting step ultimately became the time it takes the paint to dry! So earlier they had to stick to color black as it dried faster, until newer faster drying paints were available.
To identify and treat the problems of bottlenecks the fishbone diagrams (Ishikawa diagrams) are used. There is nothing magical in this, as it simply means there can be a variety of contributing factors in an assembly line bottleneck, it may be an error in humans, tiredness, or slow supply chain, problem with machines etc. And try to solve all the issues.
When there is a bottleneck junction in a big city engineers use flyovers, or bypass routes to diverge the traffic away from the bottleneck, even separating commercial cities away from schools and factories may be necessary.
It seems unnecessary to talk about these high demanding problems, let it be an engineer's job, or the manager's job. But I suggest otherwise.
Even we individuals can become stuck in bottlenecks in our lives that we feel like we are slow in progression and life seems just dragging on. Maybe it is time for us to draw a fishbone diagram and identify our root causes of problems rather than trying obvious unhelpful solutions that we have already tried. Maybe it's time to divert our route with a new flyover or create a new channel of motivation to keep up the work. Maybe it's time to ask help from someone with better knowledge and experience.
Otherwise, the bottlenecks will consume all our time and everyone following behind us will get affected at the end.
Comentários