OPS/571
March 4, 2013
Bottlenecks in a process
In week one I determined the need for better processing with vendor selection at PetSmart. As a Project Manager over Salon Operations, I know that there are several processes in the timeline and flow chart found during the process analysis that could be improved. One of those potential improvements is the elimination or reduction of bottlenecks, which are discussed below along with the TOC or Theory of Constraints by Eli Goldratt. (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006, pg. 721)
Bottlenecks
“A bottleneck is defined as any resource whose capacity is less than the demand placed upon it” (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006, pg. 725), when dealing with vendors many items can cause an issue or constraint on the resource. Dr. Eli Goldratt stated that businesses do not do as good a job at controlling their resources and stock levels. He solved the problem by using OPT or optimized production technology, by doing this he was able to identify nine rules of production scheduling that maximize production by identifying and reducing bottlenecks. During my evaluation from the first three weeks I have encountered two definite bottleneck situations. The first being the email response rate, if I do not answer all the emails in a given day from the vendors I get backed up for the following day missing key information that could have started a process the day prior, pointing out Goldratt’s rule number four which states that “an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system”(Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006, pg. 721). Therefore I understand that I am losing a day for the entire testing process by letting my emails bottleneck. Secondly, I see a bottleneck when trying to set up cross-functional team involvement. If I wait or do not set up a physical meeting to discuss the item and approve conditionally face-to-face I lose time trying to rally the team’s thoughts and compile and then