The scope and direction of this article would be to introduce the concept of bottleneck in an industry and show how eliminating them is a step towards achieving what is called 'competitive advantage'. In today’s world achieving this is easier said than done, businesses must boost their operational efficiency wherever and whenever possible. It’s a given that – if a company fails to operate efficiently it will soon find itself at the verge of extinction.
Let’s start with an understanding of what exactly a bottleneck is and what automation has anything to do with it? A bottleneck (or constraint) in a supply chain refers to the resource that requires the longest time in operations for a certain demand. An important thing about bottlenecks is that they determine the throughput of a supply chain. Now this brings us to another term - Throughput, which indicates the productivity of a process, a machine, a procedure or a system over a unit period. It’s a part of the Theory of Constraints of business management. The guiding ideology of which is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So the important thing to remember is to note that if bottlenecks are not recognized fast enough, it’s highly likely that you miss out on a chance to increase the overall throughput of the system in consideration
Now that we know what a bottleneck is and how it affects the productivity of a system let’s start to look at how they can be minimized, I say minimize because in no system can bottlenecks be completely eliminated for the simple reason that as you move on from removing one bottleneck to another a new one seems to appear, though the overall performance of the system may have improved there would still be scope for improvement at every stage of operation. These improvements in processes can be brought upon by better utilization of existing resources or by implementing new techniques. One such method would be to adopt automation, the degree of which may vary across industries. Automation is a technique of making a process or a system to operate by itself (automatically). It encompasses many vital elements and job functions and virtually provides benefits to almost every industry in existence for example:
• Manufacturing (e.g. Food, Pulp & Paper )
• Transportation (e.g. Rail, Automobile, Aerospace)
• Utilities (e.g. Electricity, Oil and Gas, Telecom)
• Defense
And many more...
The process of automation in industries happened a long time back, in fact the vision of a mechanised world flourished long before the term “automation” was coined and only recently (about 45 years ago) did the automated computer operations begin with IBM’s OS/360. It was a supervisory program that managed system resources and provided automatic transition from one job to another. This was called batch processing. Subsequent developments took place afterwards from simple job scheduling processes to fully automated assembly lines (mostly adopted in the auto industry, a human touch is still required in almost every industry no matter how advanced the automation process is). Initially automation was done only to either those
reducing bottlenecks with industrial automation
Gautham jayan
IIM Raipur