Bottlenecks in a Process

Bottlenecks in a Process

University of Phoenix

Operations Management

OPS/571

March 26, 2012

Bottlenecks in a Process

Over the past three weeks our office has conducted three official staff meetings. March 13 the meeting was cancelled due to people/cadets returning from spring break and there was no negative impact to the mission. On March 20th another meeting was conducted but by the number two person in the office because the Col was out of town. This meeting lasted 55 minutes (a new office record in 7 months). This meeting was unique because the person in charge made it very apparent that he did not want side conversations. Additionally the pace was unusually fast because a few things were skipped. Finally the meeting that was conducted on March 27th which is the first one the boss was at in over three weeks lasted 2 hours and 10 minutes. In addition to the boss needing to catch up on the three weeks of missed meetings we added some additional things to the meeting, which made it even longer.

The restraints on the staff meeting which extends the length of time that the meetings last, in turn wasting employee time is called a bottleneck (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 725). There are three bottlenecks: 1. People try and talk at the same time the boss is talking, this slows down the meeting by distracting the rest of the people at the table, annoying the person in charge, and preventing the people talking from hearing any important messages that need to be passed on by the boss. 2. Since we are in a military setting that is often seen by very high ranking people from through out the nation and the University any and all information that flows to and from our office almost always goes directly through the Boss (Colonel). When all information must be passed through the boss it slows some of the process down because instead of the subject experts of each area briefing things it must be explained to the boss who then passes it along to someone else. Hence...