Every company faces challenges that slow down its progress at times. These challenges—otherwise known as business bottlenecks—can have a variety of negative effects. It is important to identify them quickly and address them, which you can do in a variety of ways.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of process bottlenecks in depth. We’ll look at a few of their different types and explore how you can detect them quickly with a time tracker.

What is a business bottleneck?

The concept of a bottleneck is closely tied to its name. The neck of a bottle acts as a restriction for its contents, slowing down their flow. In businesses—and other related concepts, for that matter—a bottleneck is simply a restriction on the rate of progress. These issues can vary greatly in their severity, with some bottlenecks being able to grind business operations to a halt. 

That said, severe bottlenecks are typically temporary. Those that you may not notice—but persist for a while—can have a much larger impact on your firm over the long run. Let’s explore the key differences between long-term and short-term bottlenecks now.

Long-term and short-term bottlenecks: the key differences

While eliminating both forms of bottlenecks should be a priority for you, understanding the key differences between them is also important. 

Short-term bottlenecks

A short-term bottleneck is typically a one-off incident. Common examples of it include a sudden surge in orders that you weren’t prepared for, or a service outage that takes your website down for a few hours. The short-term impact of such bottlenecks can be measurable. Thus, dealing with them on time—and preventing them from happening in the future—is vital.

Long-term bottlenecks

A long-term bottleneck will slow down your company’s performance in the long run. For example, a website that loads slowly could get in the way of some conversions. While you won’t experience major negative effects from this, a small bottleneck could still add up over time. You may only lose certain opportunities here and there, but those opportunities could have been invaluable for your business in the future.

The main types of business bottlenecks

In businesses, you could classify bottlenecks in endless ways. The one we’ve chosen for this guide divides them up into three categories:

• Supply chain
• Production
• People

Supply chain bottlenecks

If you need to purchase any sort of material to make your goods, you likely get them from various suppliers. A bottleneck in your supply chain will reduce how quickly you’ll be able to continue making your products. Severe bottlenecks could even reduce your output to zero—especially if you don’t have a safety buffer.

Production

A production bottleneck takes place during the process of making your products. Such bottlenecks are caused when a part of your day-to-day operations takes longer than others. This can happen in any business, regardless of whether it makes physical products or not. These can happen if you don’t prioritize your tasks correctly or don’t provide enough resources to certain projects.

People

As the name implies, people bottlenecks are related to your company’s staff. Common examples of such bottlenecks are when employees fall sick or go on vacation for a period of time. This will effectively reduce your team’s size temporarily, slowing down progress. More severe people bottlenecks, meanwhile, can have a larger impact. This can happen if every decision at your business needs to get your approval to be greenlit—which is a sign to start delegating certain tasks.

How to identify process bottlenecks with time tracking

Time tracking is a valuable tool for spotting bottlenecks, especially in your processes. It allows you to see where time is being spent and where delays happen. Here’s how you can use time tracking to identify business bottlenecks.

Track employee productivity

By tracking the productivity of workspace members, you can detect areas of improvement. A simple distraction can be considered a bottleneck, as it will hold back your professionals from performing their best. Productivity data will let you see who’s struggling in your team and how you can help them improve their output.

Monitor progress on projects and tasks

Monitoring the progress of your projects will help in detecting bigger-picture bottlenecks. As mentioned previously, these can happen if you allocate resources incorrectly within your business. Prioritizing tasks can play a major role in the success of your company—highlighting the importance of getting this right.

Keep projects within budgets

Business bottlenecks in various areas can cause your projects to go over budget. Fortunately, tracking project budgets is simple with time trackers—especially those with dedicated Project Budgeting features. These will allow you to detect patterns in your team that are holding back your company’s output.

Choosing the best time tracker for identifying bottlenecks

Before we close off this article, let’s explore what you should look for when choosing a time tracker for identifying bottlenecks.

Lots of tracking functionality

The first thing to search for is tracking features. Many high-quality time trackers, like WebWork, offer lots of monitoring functionality and collect different types of data. Having several points of data can help verify the accuracy of key metrics, like productivity levels and task progress.

Project management features

To get the most from time tracking, choose an app that has a project management feature. This will allow you to see how time tracking data fits into the bigger picture of your company’s performance. Consequently, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions to speed up business growth.

Scalability

Finally, we have scalability. You should look for a tracker that will continue to be a good fit for your team as it grows larger and larger. It should have no limitations on the number of members, projects, or tasks. After all, you wouldn’t want your time tracker to become a bottleneck itself—instead of helping you identify them.

Concluding thoughts

Business bottlenecks can impact the productivity and growth of your company measurably. But, with the right tools, you can detect and take care of them quickly. Time tracking software can be invaluable for this purpose. A high-quality app will let you track employee productivity, task progress, and project budgets—all excellent places to look for bottlenecks.