Lean on TOC

It's easy to teach the lean tools, but what's the vision?  What are we going to accomplish in 3-5 years?  It's here we cover the critical principles of Lean before we even talk tools, and how TOC is a critical part of supporting the implementation of principles in today's more demanding and more competitive environment. Its here we find out if management is prepared for the journey that lies ahead.

It will become clear within the first hour of this session that the vast majority of the people in your company don't  know if they are having an impact on the firm because they don't know how to keep score. To provide Value to the customer, we first should understand what value is.

We are still not to the Lean tools.  We need to focus on flow, and find out where flow is failing.  This is a combination of a classic lean tool, the Value Stream Map, and the basic Theory of Constraint concept, the bottleneck.  Combining these two concepts together is the most powerful aspect of Lean on TOC.

A Theory of Constraints tool packed with Lean concepts, DBR uses a pacesetter (Drum) to control the amount of inventory the system.  When the drum "beats"  a Rope "pulls" more Raw Material into the system.  The drum is kept beating at a constant, predictable rate by a small amount of buffer in front of it. Installing a simple computer based DBR system is often more cost effective than a manual card system or a forecast-based EOQ ERP system.

We will not list them all here, but we'll start with 5S to clean up the bottleneck area.  Observation of the bottleneck will help us figure out what tool to learn and use next.  Note, we'll let the problem lead us to the tool, and we'll teach and implement that.

Another great tool in the Lean tool kit is the Action Plan.  We'll cover this method in detail and we go through iterations of solutions, especially when our proposed solutions don't go as plannned.

Another, and perhaps most powerful tool in the Toyota Production system, is Hansei, or self reflection.  A time for reflection for what worked and what didn't, despite success or failure, is likely to keep Toyota on top for a long time.  In our process, we'll make Hansei a habit after every major milestone.

Critical Chain Project Management, Clouds, Pull Systems, Design of Experiments etc., There are many more tools in Lean, Theory of Constraints, and Six Sigma. Use Wikipedia for the details, and we'll use them as part of your process as the need arises