## Description A bottleneck is a point in a process where work or resources flow slower than the rest of the process. This causes: - Upstream processes to become congested - Downstream processes to become underutilised - Bottlenecks can be less unintuitive in complex systems and identification of bottlenecks can be difficult. - Resolving bottlenecks can/will cause new system elements to become a bottleneck - so remember goalsetting! - Bottlenecks can be planned behavior for the system in certain conditions - E.g., in crowd management, one uses funnels and gates to limit the speed of how fast metal heads can get into the mosh pit Questions for the reader? 1. Do all systems have bottlenecks? Can you imagine a system without ones? ## Examples ## Related notes - [[System Analysis]] - [[Production line design]] - [[Discrete event simulation]] and [[Simulation]] in general - [[Takt Time]] - [[Value Stream Mapping]] ## Academic roots