It is always sad to hear of the passing of someone who has had a profound effect on your life, so even though I had never met Eliyahu M Goldratt, it made me reflect when I saw a post on a Linked-In group that he had died.Goldratt was an Israeli physicist who became a business management guru, his specialism was in process improvement and optimisation where he coined the ‘Theory of Constraints’ model. This model identifies bottlenecks/constraints within a process, removes the bottleneck to improve capacity of the system and moves onto the next bottleneck.
Another aspect of the Theory of Constraints is that there will be excess capacity at non-critical points throughout the system/process which is a waste of resources.
Goldratt describes this model through a book called The Goal which is written not as simply a business text but as a novel where the main character Alex has ninety days to save his beleaguered factory. The book is fantastic and communicates the ideas of the Theory of Constraints in a truly effective, engaging and memorable way – I must have recommended the book to clients, colleagues and students over 100 times.
And.....it works, one of my first consulting assignments was for Ford Motor Company where I was looking at the efficiency of an engine line. My client wanted to have an engine at every workstation and one waiting – however, applying the Theory of Constraints it was clear that as long as the bottleneck workstations were never starved of engines to work on the system would be running at capacity. We implemented the changes and saved over £100,000 in trays to transport the engines, let alone the work in progress costs – thank-you Eliyahu!
If you have never read ‘The Goal’ you should and if you have you should read it again – I think I will.
No comments:
Post a Comment