Bottleneck Entities

A bottleneck entity is identified for each line to determine the line’s performance rate. The bottleneck entity line position is the entity or set of parallel entities in a line that have the lowest expected production rate, and thus limit the rate at which the entire line can produce items.

The entity production rate can vary by whether a job is running or not and by which job is running. Therefore, the bottleneck is not necessarily a fixed entity or line position, but can be determined programmatically (either by MES Web Portal or by MES Stateless API calls) given the current production situation.

The production rate for a set of parallel entities is determined by adding the appropriate production rates of each eligible entity (that is, entities that are not disabled or that can be bottlenecks) and converting them to a common unit of measure (see Line Configuration Settings). The production rate of the bottleneck entity, or parallel entities, is used as the line's production rate, and the performance amount of the bottleneck entity, or parallel entities, is used as the line's performance amount.