activities that helped reduce time and effort to implementing them in specific areas in the industry where manual labour, which over a period of time could lead to fatigue and eventual slowdown in the entire process. These are key areas wherein processes can begin to slow down and create bottlenecks, and automation makes sure that specific areas (may be a small unit or an entire process) in the production line, usually those where critical tasks that may either be complex in nature or have many tasks following the same are completed on time and delays are minimized as much as possible
Automation of processes that involve critical tasks usually help reduce the bottleneck, but it should be taken care that the bottleneck machine (the machine whose process time determines the entire system’s time) should not be made to over-work. There are certain ways to effectively manage these bottlenecks which include:
• Optimising the bottleneck machine speed: It is usually assumed that the bottleneck machine, if operated at full speed would make the process more efficient. However this is not entirely true as faster running may increase downtime due to maintenance issues, breakdowns or even reduce yield due to poor quality product.
•More operators for the bottleneck machines: Cross-training of operators to ensure that the bottleneck machines do not idle due to lack of operators and wherever possible the bottleneck machine should be run to full potential, this might seem as an expensive option but the overall impact can be positive.
• Continuous bottleneck management: As mentioned earlier when one bottleneck is taken care of another one appears and becomes the focus of attention. There are various factors such as the product mix, raw material variations etc. that change from day to day and managing bottlenecks becomes a continuous process.
Other factors such as effective maintenance and provision of constant buffer can minimize scrap and also go further by automating product flow through a bottleneck based on the drum buffer rope ‘pull’ scheduling of Lean Manufacturing.
Automation
& bottlenecks
Some of the questions that are needed to be asked in order for considering automation are
• How much time will be freed up because of automation?
• What are the business opportunities that might be lost, if any, because of automation?
• Would automation in any way improve the safety of the workers?
•How does automation improve traceability and reliability?
• How exactly would automation enhance the efficiency and standardization of procedures?
Now if all these reasons prompt to choose an automated system then how would it impact bottlenecks, will this actually work
Let’s take the example of IBMs – Service virtualisation and see how automation in testing has contributed to improvements in bottlenecks