A new method for bottleneck detection

This paper presents a new method to identify and rank the bottlenecks in a manufacturing system. The proposed method is based on performance related data that are easy to capture, offers low computational burden and less prone to be in error due to its simplicity. The proposed method analyzes inter-departure time from different machines to identify and rank the bottlenecks. In a follow-up paper the authors plan to present a method to allocate loss of production to different machines based on analysis of inter-departure time. This paper also proposes a set of rules that may be used to improve data integrity. The proposed method may be used to analyze both steady state as well as non-steady state data and can be extended easily to analysis of a job shop.