Process - Cycle Time Bottleneck.

Best for: Proving by length that most of a lead time is waiting during an improvement review, negotiating SLAs for transactional work such as BPO, underwriting, or logistics, putting process cycle efficiency on a slide as both a figure and a picture, and showing an engineering lead time retrospective that moving hands faster is not the answer

Use: Use it when the slide has to answer why a process takes as long as it does. One full-width bar alternates between processing and waiting segments whose widths track their real shares, so the proportion spent waiting is visible as length rather than as an argument. The total lead time and the process cycle efficiency sit side by side at the top to back the verdict with numbers, and the bottom pins down one bottleneck segment, its cause, and the target in a line each. It belongs in improvement reviews, SLA negotiations over transactional work, and lead time retrospectives, wherever the conclusion has to be remove the waiting rather than work faster.

Avoid: Use process-timeline-steps when only the order matters and length carries no meaning, process-funnel when the question is how much drops out at each stage, and process-kanban-wip-board for how many items sit where right now. Use chart-waterfall-bridge for a story that moves from an opening value through increments to a closing one, chart-pareto-8020 to rank causes by frequency and argue that a few explain most of them, and process-raci-matrix when the question is who owns each stage. With seven or more segments the narrow widths cannot hold their names, so group them down to six or fewer, and if the per-segment durations have not been measured yet, measure before drawing: a bar painted by intuition turns its own length into false evidence.