TSA makes another apparently logical explanation. If the powder is left in the bag, it may require the screening agent to flag it for deeper screening. This leads to the bag being kicked out for a hand check and then a second pass through the X-ray machine. The screening process is slowed down both because the screener has to pull the bag and because there’s increased “demand” for X-ray screening as the bag must pass through twice.
So, this is both about efficacy and efficiency.
But will the new procedures properly followed by travelers not slow down the overall process? As I noted in another article, saving time at the screening process does NOT mean the overall process will not be impacted – or impacted much.
What we have here is a shifting bottleneck. When TSA assigns more work to its passenger-employees to reduce work on its blue shirted employees, they are very likely moving the bottleneck even more to the Passenger Prep stage of the overall process.
Unless TSA then implements improvement actions to speed up the Prep process, the overall processing time will be lengthened and the rate of “production” could be lowered.
Each time the TSA requires more steps for the passenger-employee that prep stage slows down, and maybe worse, increases the congestion and frays the nerves of people in queue. Classic muri and mura.
Bottlenecks are never eliminated. Every process always has a bottleneck. If you “break” one bottleneck, the bottleneck will shift to another limited or constrained resource.
That doesn’t mean to ignore bottlenecks. Breaking a true bottleneck will speed the process. Just always examine the impact of one change upon the process as a whole. You might be shifting the bottleneck to another stage and make that stage worse than the bottleneck that was “fixed.” Get rid of the tunnel vision.
And if you’re in a service business, remember that your customers are your “employees” too. Consider their work design too.