pinchpoint

Pinch point is a term used in industrial safety and operations management to describe a location or condition where body parts can be caught between moving or stationary parts, or where a process’s capacity is restricted, leading to a bottleneck.

In workplace safety, pinch points are hazards where fingers, hands, clothing, or limbs can be crushed or entangled. Common examples include gears, belts, rollers, presses, dumpsters, and conveyor systems. Mitigation involves machine guarding, safe operating procedures, lockout/tagout, emergency stops, training, and regular risk assessments to identify and eliminate pinch points.

In operations and supply chains, pinch points refer to bottlenecks that limit overall throughput. They occur when demand exceeds the capacity of a particular step, resource, or facility. Pinch point analysis uses flow mapping and line balancing to locate the constraint. Remedies include increasing capacity at the bottleneck (adding equipment, moving work, overtime), reducing variability (setup reductions, standardized work), or reconfiguring processes to smooth flow.

Pinch points also appear in fields such as transportation and water management, where narrow bridges or choked corridors reduce capacity, creating congestion or reduced flow. The term emphasizes a constricted point that governs the performance of the whole system.