Process Bottleneck Finder
Find the one step that caps your output, how long work waits in line, and what fixing it is worth.
Example scenario—not a forecast or verified benchmark. Enable JavaScript to edit inputs, view charts, save locally and export your analysis.
Example inputs
- Process steps, in order
- [{"name":"Order entry & quoting","cycleMin":15,"waitHours":4,"capacityPerDay":40},{"name":"Engineering / design","cycleMin":60,"waitHours":16,"capacityPerDay":14},{"name":"Production","cycleMin":90,"waitHours":24,"capacityPerDay":11},{"name":"QA / inspection","cycleMin":20,"waitHours":6,"capacityPerDay":25},{"name":"Ship / install","cycleMin":25,"waitHours":8,"capacityPerDay":30}]
- Customer demand
- 13
- Gross profit per unit
- 450
- Working days per year
- 250
- Capacity gain you could achieve at the bottleneck
- 25
Example results
Production is your bottleneck: fixing it by 25% adds 2 units/day, worth about $225K a year in gross profit.
- Bottleneck step
- Production
- Annual profit from fixing it
- $225,000
- Current throughput
- 11
- Unmet demand
- 2
- Gross profit lost to the constraint
- $225,000
- End-to-end lead time
- 62 hrs
- Process cycle efficiency
- 5.7%
- Bottleneck utilization
- 118.2%
What stands out
Production caps output at 11 units/day
Demand is 13/day, so 2 units/day go unbuilt, roughly $225K of gross profit a year.
Work is actively touched 5.7% of the time
A unit spends 61.5 hours end to end but only 3.5 hours being worked on. The longest queue is before Production (24 hrs).
Next actions
- Protect Production: never let it sit idle waiting on inputs, breaks, or setups. An hour lost there is an hour lost for the whole business.
- Add capacity at Production first (overtime, a second shift, cross-trained staff, or offloading non-critical work) before investing anywhere else.
- Cut the 24-hour queue before Production with smaller batches and a daily priority list.
- Re-measure capacity after each change; the constraint will move.
Model assumptions & limitations
- Capacities are steady-state averages; real throughput is lower when demand is uneven.
- Gain assumes the extra output can be sold at the same gross profit per unit.
- The ~85% utilization warning is a queueing rule of thumb, not a hard limit.
- Wait times are entered by you; lead time = sum of hands-on and queue times.