Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [777]
3Literature reviews are provided for each of the TOC application areas at the beginning of each section in this handbook.
1The figures in this chapter and some of the discussion are based upon material presented by the authors in their book Release the Hostages, published by North River Press in 2009. We wish to thank North River Press for their kind permission to present it here.
2Customer Support Services is known by several names including customer support, customer services, customer support services, technical support, or technical services. We will use the term customer services, or CS for short.
Copyright © 2010 by Alex Klarman and Richard Klapholz.
3The Thinking Processes are not taught in this chapter; it is assumed that the reader either is familiar with the processes or can read Section VI of the Handbook.
1While not called Theory of Constraints at the time, many of the concepts are presented in Goldratt (1984).
2See Kendall (2004).
3For a discussion of Strategy and Tactic Trees, see Chapters 15, 18, 25 and 34.
Copyright © 2010 by Gary Wadhwa.
4An excellent discussion of Critical Chain in a multi-project environment is provided in Kendall and Rollins (2003).
5See Pascal Dennis (2007) and Sayer and Williams (2007) for descriptions and examples of the use of lean tools.
6See Mikel and Schroeder (2000) and Gygi, DeCarlo, Williams, and Covey (2005) for descriptions and examples on Six Sigma.
7We run into dilemma and debate on what level of care must be provided to everyone. Where should society draw a line between mandatory health care verses voluntary individual choice of care? Should government provide health care for all or should we allow the free market to provide high quality, reliable care? This chapter does not get into a political debate. It does discuss the need to speed up the cure rate and provide reliable care.
8© E. M. Goldratt used by permission, all rights reserved. (For a full development of this POOGI, see the section on performance measurement.)
9Throughput takes into account variable costs of supplies for each service, the time utilization, number of patients served, and dollars paid by insurance companies.
10Please note, there is a strong assumption built into this argument. The private practices and hospitals can improve their Throughput significantly by the first two steps that the low value T/CU segment of population will become a significant source of profits. This is not different from the airline or hotel industries that try to fill the capacity by offering discounts through Priceline, Orbitz, etc. For-profit organizations have to discriminate and make rational decisions based upon TA in order to show bottom-line results.
11Example: For surgical procedures, the patients are more tolerant if the surgery prior to them is delayed. They have been fasting, taken time from work, and they are not interested in rushing the surgeon to perform faster, whereas during quick consulting or postsurgery follow-up time, any delay appears longer. The patients’ expectations are to get in and out so that they can go on with their lives.
12The TOCICO Dictionary (Sullivan et al., 2007, 47) defines Throughput (T) as “The rate at which the system generates ‘goal units’. Because throughput is a rate, it is always expressed for a given time period such as per month, week, day or even minute. If the goal units are money, throughput will be an amount of money per time period. In that case throughput is calculated as revenues received minus totally variable costs divided by the chosen time period.
Illustration: Suppose a company produces only one product, and it sells for $100 and has totally variable costs of $35 per unit. If, in a week, the company produces 500 units but only sells 450, throughput would be $29,250 per week ((100-35)