Bottleneck findings
- Most constraining step: Reel slitting (holds up 4 steps).
- For the scenario: none stops none.
Executive Intelligence · Operations and Transformation
Operational Bottleneck Discovery
Shows where work waits (review queues, overdue approvals) from recorded timestamps.
Demonstration: Fernhill Packaging Ltd (fictional) · Manufacturing. Fictional data and a scripted answer.
The situation
- Organisation
- Fernhill Packaging Ltd (fictional)
- Who is asking
- Operations director
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- What happened
- Output has plateaued although every line has spare capacity on paper, and the director wants to find the step that holds everything back.
The question asked
Where is the bottleneck in our end-to-end process, and what does a stoppage there hold up?
What it reads, and who can see the result
- Process map with step capacities registerSteps and what feeds what.
- Reads
- The process map and step capacities.
- Does not read
- Individual workers' performance.
- Permission
- Operations excellence access.
- Who sees it
- The operations director and plant managers.
Try it
Fail one or more items and see what stops and what only degrades, worked out by following the dependencies.
Choose what stops or runs at a crawl. Hard dependencies stop with it; soft ones carry on, degraded.
- Plenty of capacity.
- Two presses; one often down.Depends on: Reel slitting (hard)
- One machine; runs near its limit.Depends on: Printing (hard)
- Three lines; spare capacity.Depends on: Die cutting (hard)
- Sampling station.Depends on: Die cutting (soft)
- Flexible labour.Depends on: Folding and gluing (hard), Quality inspection (soft)
- stops or runs at a crawl
- 0
- Stops as a result
- 0
- Degraded
- 0
- Unaffected
- 6
The answer
Simulated answer. Written for this fictional case, not produced by a live model. Only the figures in it are computed, from what you decided above.
A stoppage at none stops 0 step(s) and degrades 0.
Following the flow, a stoppage at none stops none and degrades none [S1][S2]. The step whose stoppage holds up the most is Reel slitting, which holds up 4 others.
Every line has spare capacity on paper, yet output is capped because every box must pass through the single die-cutting machine. The bottleneck is the step with one machine and no alternative, not the one that looks busiest.
Relies on: S1 · End-to-end process mapS2 · Step capacity measurements
Review and approval
The operations director decides. Approving sets the order in which bottleneck relief is investigated. It does not buy equipment or change a schedule.
Not ready to approve. Fail at least one item first, to see what depends on it.
In the product this is a different person with the right permission. Here you play that role to see the rule.
What it produces
Limits of this example
- Capacities are measured, but only at the times measured.
- The map shows structure, not queueing or setup time.
- This is a scripted demonstration on fictional data. No model was called and no real organisation, person or result is shown.
More in Executive Intelligence
- Enterprise Health MonitorOne view of whether the organisation's governed functions are healthy, built only from verified source readings.
- Executive Priority EngineRanks what needs executive attention across modules by stated, inspectable rules (overdue, severity, deadline, owner).
- Cross-Functional IntelligenceShows how an item in one function relates to items in others, using only links that are recorded (a finding to its obligation, a handover to its training).
- Business Performance NarrativeA plain-language summary of verified readings for a period.
- Strategic Planning AdvisorA planning workspace for objectives, assumptions, initiatives, owners and review dates, as recorded by people.
- Market Expansion IntelligenceCompares candidate markets or jurisdictions using verified, dated external data and the organisation's own compliance footprint.
- Competitive IntelligenceRecords competitor facts that a person enters with a source and a date, plus approved public-source feeds.
- Growth Opportunity DiscoverySurfaces opportunities from the organisation's own verified data (for example repeat findings, unused capability, unserved locations) as hypotheses for a person to accep…
The Executive Intelligence story · This capability in the full register