Bottlenecks in a Process

Bottlenecks in A Process

In the first assignment, I identified a process that needed improvement. I created a way that was effective in the day-to-day transactions of the retirees for the United States Postal Service. Determining the steps in the transactions that can be presented and enhanced, while developing the entire process more effective, helping to improving efficiency, which is the object of this analysis. Time in the daily transactions improves, sound use of time management skills will be created, stress will be reduced, and time spent will diminish.

A bottleneck is "the activity in a process that limits the overall capacity of the process" (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006, p.312). Constraints must be removed in the system so that through put is not limited. Li, Chang, & Ni (2009) stated that "Quick and correct identification of the bottleneck locations can lead to an improvement in the operation management of utilizing finite manufacturing resources, increasing the system throughput, and minimizing the total cost of production" (p.5019). Preparing retirees for retirement is a very detailed process. Every step adds to the time. For example, calculated over a month period, the average time of getting retirees ready for retirement is about one hour process. As I begin to calculate the time spent on preparing the retirees for retirement, I did not specifically state how long the process would take for each retiree. Not having the sufficient date to gauze how productive the retirement process is can be recognized as a bottleneck. Time is crucial element when it comes to optimizing productivity throughout the retirement process. Taking longer breaks and lunches longer than usual and letting external influences distracting while completing the process for retirees. Also having a distraction can be recognized as a bottleneck. When using Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, we will be able to create a plan of action on how each constraint will be exploited and evaluated.

Goldratt's Theory of Constraints

Goldratt's Theory of Constraints focus on five steps that are designed to optimize the productivity of the process by identifying constraints, deciding how to exploit the constraints, aligning the entire system with the exploitation decision, evaluating the constraints, and continuing to identify bottlenecks in the event that the evaluations prove the system to still be broken (Chase, Jacobs, & Acquilano, 2006, p. 721). In order to gather the insufficient data bottleneck, there must be a section for calculating the time to process each application for retirement. In order to gather the distractions bottleneck, there must data for the time to process each applicant and all potential distractions. There must be a log of the time process and the distractions were.