Pullonkaulat

Pullonkaulat, or bottlenecks, are points in a process or system where limited capacity constrains overall throughput. The term comes from the image of a bottle's narrow neck, through which only a limited amount can pass at a time. Bottlenecks can appear in manufacturing, logistics, information technology, and service delivery, among other domains, and they determine the maximum rate at which a system can produce output.

Causes include insufficient equipment capacity, equipment maintenance, poor process layout, high variability in demand, long changeover times, or limited staffing. When a bottleneck is active, items accumulate upstream, causing longer lead times, higher work-in-progress, and underutilization downstream.

Identification involves data collection on process times and work-in-progress, value-stream mapping, throughput analysis, and queueing theory. In theory of constraints (TOC), the bottleneck limits system throughput; improving it yields the greatest gains, while other stages should be synchronized to avoid starvation or idling.

Mitigation strategies include increasing capacity at the bottleneck (adding machines or staff, longer shifts), reducing variability (standardization, preventive maintenance), reducing setup times, parallelizing work, or balancing flows so non-bottleneck stages do not overwhelm the bottleneck. In IT, bottlenecks may be addressed by optimizing databases, caching, load balancing, or upgrading resources. In transportation and supply chains, strategies include buffering, inventory optimization, and alternate routing.

Pullonkaulat are a normal feature of complex systems; their management focuses on elevating the system's overall throughput rather than optimizing individual stages in isolation.