Productivity is critical for any business. While individual work is a central factor, it’s also important to consider the bigger picture. How do things work as a team? Is everyone working at the same pace? Or are there any delays or setbacks that are slowing your team down as a whole?
This is where bottlenecks come into play. In this post, we’ll discuss how bottlenecks work, some common examples and how to overcome them in your business.
For those who aren’t familiar with the bottleneck metaphor, it alludes to the way water is poured out of a bottle. At maximum tilt, the water can still only come out as fast as the narrowest part of the bottle allows it to – namely, the bottleneck. This metaphor is commonly applied to driving, where a road becomes narrow and traffic has to slow to merge into a single lane.
In business, it refers to any part of your operation which slows down the flow of your work as a whole. In other words, your process can only go as fast as the slowest part in the system. This part of the system is known as the bottleneck. To make things go faster, you need to tackle it.
Bottlenecks are more common than you might think in business. In 2018, for example, Gartner predicted that a digital content bottleneck would be the main cause of failure in marketing. This highlights how bottlenecks aren’t specifically about people, but more the systems within which those people work.
Let’s say you have a team of five staff creating images for online ads but only one person to review and approve them. If that person is overloaded with work, they will become the bottleneck through no fault of their own. The rest of the team won’t be able to proceed with the rest of the process until those images are approved. To eliminate the bottleneck, you need to find ways to make that person’s job easier and more productive.
When it comes to marketing and asset creation, the review and approval process is one of the most common bottlenecks for businesses. Fortunately, there are ways to eliminate this bottleneck without having to compromise on quality or increase staff numbers.
Digital asset management makes collaboration easier with a flexible security model and the ability to share files and collections with other users. With instant access to the files they need to see, and a quick way to update other members of the team when things are ready to use, there is less chance of a bottleneck developing.
At iBase, we’re confident our feature-packed digital asset management system can eliminate bottlenecks and improve productivity for practically any business.
