Production Process in a Company

Depicted below is the production process flow for company with timing requirement for set ups and related processes to take place for all the four processes that finally accomplish the final product.

Bottleneck Identification:       

As depicted in the process diagram above its very evident that bottleneck lies in the second stage of process i.e "Shaping & Edging" and the real bottleneck is the set-up time reqd. While one can argue that as this process is most important for production its justifiable but the simple counter argument would be can production process do away with any of the remaining processes and hence bottleneck is a bottleneck and needs attention and some solution around it. To explain how really it is a bottleneck let us assume that we need to produce different products one by one and hence need setups each time. We start with set-up time of 2 min for cutting and simultaneously start with set-up of shaping process of duration 10 mins but even after a product is processed through cutting taking 3 mins in process and cumulative time of 2+3=5 mins the setup of shaping is not done and needs additional 5 mins and hence the waiting time leading to inefficiency in process at present setup and assumptions made.