Question

Chapter Seven presented ideas concerning constraints and bottlenecks in production and how these limit the overall output of a company. Share with the class a couple of examples of bottlenecks or constraints from your work experience or from your personal life. As an alternative topic for discussion, from Chapter Eight, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using the payback method to evaluate competing projects?

Answer 1

Bottlenecks and constraints are the two important considerations that limit the capacity and scope of production and operation. Any firm willing to increase the capacity has to identify the bottleneck, change the constraints and eliminate it to get the desired results. The first example is the manufacturing setup of dairy company that processed fluid milk. Here, bottleneck identified is the packaging machine that has a smaller capacity. As a result, the milk is pasteurized and ready to be packaged for final sales, but it cannot be done, because packaging machine is of smaller capacity. Here, packaging machine is bottleneck in the whole production system. An example of a constraint is the presence of manpower that limits the production work that requires many workers to achieve the desired production level. Since, the manpower available in the night shift is lesser, so it acted as a constraint in the manufacturing setup and output level in the night shift was relatively lower. So, bottleneck and constraints are to be effectively managed if a firm wants to maximize the capacity utilization.