Five Tips to Avoid Process Debottlenecking

Debottlenecking process is a method for improving effectiveness as well as production capacity in any plant by bringing about changes in workflow and configuration of equipments. The approach also involves elimination of bottlenecks which constrain throughput.

The benefit of this methodology is that it helps in improving capacity at marginal cost in comparison to expenditure required for new development.

In the following sections let us look at few tips which help in avoiding process bottlenecks.

Tip #1

Identification of Bottlenecks

Earlier, debottlenecking plant process involved paying attention to facility resources which are mostly utilized.

The idea was that since such resources have higher utilization, improvements in such type of resources will be more beneficial. But the problem with such approach is that is does not guarantee identification of actual bottlenecks in the organization.

Tip #2

Debottlenecking Detection

As we can see, any simple use depend approach cannot properly trace actual process constraints. The answer is to utilize simulation model so that controlled modifications can be done over a model and then results observed based upon metrics.

An example would be of reducing operation time for all the steps in any process one by one and monitor the impact they have over throughput.

Tip #3

Simulation of a Facility

Simulation of any particular facility where any particular step of the process uses least amount of time can help in judging effect of such activity.

If such experiment is repeated for all the activities then it gives the opportunity to comprehend the probability of reducing cycle time for any particular project.

Such type of analysis helps in correct identification of complex bottlenecks as actual modifications are made over a system model so that effect of such modifications can be checked.

Tip #4

Evaluation and Alleviation

After identification of any bottleneck completes the debottlenecking process then involves removing those bottlenecks. The main idea is to quantify necessary changes before judging whether any activity is diverting from its actual path.

This is where sensitivity analysis can be performed for making changes to few resources or activities but with greater amount of granularity.

As example of how it works would be a situation where set up time of any bioreactor is reduced by one, two and three hours. After that impact of such reduction in time over cycle time or throughput is analyzed.

The advantage of this approach to debottlenecking plant processes is that it offers useful quantitative data for engineering teams to work on since explicit tradeoff can be checked between different KPIs at separate change levels.

Tip #5

Debottlenecking Iteration

It is important to repeat the process of detection, evaluation as well as removal of various process bottlenecks so that incremental improvements can be achieved.

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