Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [505]
The routings had not kept up with the growth of the company—as equivalent resources had been added, the routings continued to identify a specific resource at a specific plant.
As the company’s TOC implementation had progressed, the plant managers and supervisors of the various plants had established robust interplant communications, and it could be quite easy to identify where to move orders in order to ensure that orders “sit” only when there is no capable resource available to process them.
The injections, then, became obvious and were communicated and implemented within days:
If the resource on the routing is busy and another equivalent resource is available, move orders to any equivalent resource that is available, irrespective of color.
TABLE 25-2 Steel Products Company Necessary Condition Assumptions
Modify the routings so that equivalent resources are not an exception. (Upon subjecting the injections to NBR, the company decided to take the approach to modify routings as new orders are placed. As a make-to-order (MTO) company, this enabled the company to modify routings as they were needed, and avoided the expenditure of key personnel time on making unneeded modifications.)
If you would like to use the POOGI Cloud template in your organization, see Appendix D on the McGraw-Hill website: http://www.mhprofessional.com/TOCHandbook.
Conflict can be seen as a gift of energy, in which neither side loses and a new dance is created.
—Thomas Crum
The Integrated TOC Thinking Processes
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
—Stephen Hawking
We have explored the fundamental assumptions and basic building blocks of the TOC TP, in terms of the way that cause-and-effect logic, the protocol used for mapping the logic, the mindset required, and the scientific premise on which TOC and the TP are based. By putting to use the basics, you will be well prepared to use the full set of TP in order to improve any system.
To improve something means to make it better. And the only way for something to get better is if it changes. Think about the vast number of variables in any organization, relationship, or individual that could be better. If this is difficult to imagine, just think about the number of complaints you make or hear throughout any given day! If you agree that some improvements are better than others, and that the list of potential improvements outstrips the capacity available to make improvements, then you would conclude that in order to ensure a meaningful state of ongoing improvement, we must be able to systematically answer three fundamental questions (Goldratt 1990):
1. What to Change? Given everything that could be changed, what should be changed? No person or organization has infinite time on their hands, so if we are going to spend time making changes, it behooves us to distinguish between the important few and the trivial many. We should have a way to identify the variables that, if changed, could render the most signficant improvement to the system.
Throughout this chapter, I use the words system and situation. I am not using them synonymously, though. A system is “a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.” A situation is “the combination of circumstances at a given moment; a state of affairs” (The American Heritage® Dictionary, 2004). We need both an understanding of the system itself and of the situation (state) in which the system finds itself, in order to find the answer to “What to change?”
2. To What to Change? Once we pinpoint what we want to improve, we should define the improvement itself—the future improved state we intend to create—and articulate the specific changes that need to be put in place in