Knijppunten

Knijppunten is a Dutch term used in operations research and process management to describe points in a process or system where capacity is constrained, causing the overall flow to be limited. In English, the term translates roughly to bottlenecks. A knijppunt governs the maximum throughput of the system because work cannot proceed faster than the slowest, most heavily loaded step.

Knijppunten can occur in manufacturing lines, logistics networks, service processes, and digital systems. They arise from imbalances between process steps, variability in task times, limited resources, or shared equipment. Identifying knijppunten typically involves mapping the process, measuring throughput and cycle times, and looking for queues and high utilization steps; Little's Law and queueing theory are commonly used tools.

Managing knijppunten focuses on either increasing the bottleneck’s capacity or reducing the load on it. Strategies include adding resources or automation at the bottleneck, redistributing work to other steps, reducing variability, and implementing buffers so the bottleneck is constantly fed. Process redesign, line balancing, standardization, and, in some cases, parallelization or outsourcing may remove or relocate the bottleneck. The approach is often framed within the Theory of Constraints (TOC) as the drum-buffer-rope method.

Examples: In a manufacturing assembly line, the painting station may be the knijppunt if it takes longer than adjacent steps. In IT, a slow database query can become a knijppunt that delays user requests. Recognizing and addressing knijppunten is central to improving lead times, on-time delivery, and overall process performance.