E-myth Revisited

Ankesh, you mention about things backing up and having more to do if you take a day off. That tells me that you may need to backtrack a bit and do a flow sheet analysis to find and eliminate the bottlenecks. It probably doesn't have to be ultra sophisticated since you do have a system, of sorts, in place, but you do need to take note of WHAT needs to be done, in what order, and by whom.

If things are bottlenecking then one of several things are true:

1. One person or portion of the system has too much to handle or is not up to the task so it needs to be looked at and possibly broken down a bit. Also consider some additional training as appropriate.

2. The tasks are not clearly defined so people doing them do not know exactly where their priority tasks are coming from and when, and how to handle them and then hand them off to the right person/department when completed.

3. If you are the source of the bottleneck (which I suspect in one instance at least since you have extra to do when you return after a day off) then you need to get busy and train someone else to do what you'd ordinarily do so you don't have to double time things to take a day off.

No matter what the problem, if things are bottlenecking, a flow chart will help you sort out the problem. If you see a place with 5 source inputs and only 1 output, you have a potential bottleneck in most cases.

A small example: if a machine can cap l bottle per round and the bottles are coming in 3 per round, there's an obvious imbalance there and changes need to be made. Same thing with people and tasks.

Hope this is some help.

Sandi Bowman