The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: And this is all TOC related?
KK: Yes, but there are other disciplines involved. You have to understand
simulation, and how it predicts throughput, and why it’s important to
understand where the bottleneck will be for a future design. But TOC is the
basis for what we do. I still teach a two-day course. We might go to a plant
and train the whole staff in how to use TOC concepts. I always give out
copies of 
The Goal
ahead of time and ask them to read it before the training.
It’s gotten to the point in manufacturing, however, where there are not that
many people left to go through the training. My internal customers are
usually very savvy now about TOC, bottlenecks, data collection and analysis.
So I rarely have to sell the concept anymore. Demand for data collection
implementation to drive the bottleneck software, for example, exceeds our
ability to install. And while I’m responsible for GM North America, this
week alone I have people in China and in Europe working on these kinds of
issues.
DW: How has your use of TOC concepts changed over the years?
KK: What we found when we first started out is that we were dealing with
the low-hanging fruit. You look at that first example I told you about, and it
was very obvious that the office was in the way, and the solution was just to
move it. Over time, the solutions to the problems have become a lot more
difficult to find. This doesn’t mean you can’t solve them, it just means you
might have to use more scientific techniques. Now I might have to apply
statistical methods as opposed to simple observation to understand what’s

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driving the problem at a work station.
Another thing we’re doing lately is applying what we’ve learned from 
The
Goal
to the design of new plants and production lines. In effect, we’re
solving problems before they arise. Eli Goldratt hasn’t spent a lot of time
talking about using TOC in that way, but we’ve taken his concepts and
adopted them to our needs. That’s been the beauty of it for me. If you
understand the logic and the reason behind the methodology, then you can
apply that stuff continuously.