what is a bottleneck in the services industry 
many services are carried out by human beings who have a natural limit on how fast or efficiently they can work for instance a barber may only be able to cut the hair of three individuals per hour if more people want a haircut they will have to wait and this can cause a backlog ways to reduce a bottleneck are to hire additional barbers or to increase the efficiency of the barber using technology or skills training so that they can accommodate four customers per hour the bottom linea bottleneck is a point of congestion in a production system that slows or stops progress short term bottlenecks are temporary and often caused by a labor shortage long term bottlenecks are more incorporated into the system itself and characterized by inefficient machinery or processes since bottlenecking is counterproductive and leads to a reduction in production efficiency eliminating bottlenecks is key to increasing profitability the best way to eliminate bottlenecks is to increase system capacity by restructuring the process or investing in people and machinery 