The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: And there were others?
SW: One was the saws that cut the pipes. We offloaded some of the work to
another machine that was just sitting there doing nothing. That saw ran at half
the speed of the other saw, no one ever wanted to use it. But we identified
just the right materials to run on it, which built just enough capacity to
eliminate the saw as a constraint. And then the paint department was next, we
did a couple of things there. At which point the constraint shifted to
engineering. We were waiting for some new products to come out, and that’s
kind of where it ended up.
DW: Do you believe that TOC is an infinite process? In other words, is
there always going to be another constraint you can find and exploit?
SW: Theoretically, it can go on forever. But from what I’ve seen, it goes
through one or two cycles within a facility, and then you’ve kind of broken
the constraint in the production operation. Then it may move to, say,
engineering. Then you can apply Critical Chain to the engineering group and
eliminate that as a constraint, and then the next constraint usually is the
market, and typically it’s the existing market. Unless you’re Coke or GE or
whoever, you probably don’t have a dominant position in your market. So
you can still find room to grow. Finally, there are plenty of cases where,
using the same capabilities that you generated using TOC, you can attack
new markets that you never thought you could compete in. At that point,
you’re probably doing all you can handle anyway.
Or maybe it goes back to manufacturing again. Could be, yeah, and you
definitely know how to deal with that by then.
DW: Alright. So then you moved on?
SW: I actually went to Grant Thornton for two years and worked on
developing other TOC skills and applying what I knew to an ERP [enterprise
resource planning] implementation at a plant in Mexico, working with
Navistar International. I did that for about two years. Traveled to Mexico a
lot, gained about 40 pounds, got no exercise. But it was kind of fun. Then I
went to work for a consulting firm. Within about a month I was put on my

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first project, involving TOC, at a manufacturing facility in Clarksville,
Tennessee, where they made graphite electrodes for the steel industry. It was
a big plant, had been there quite a while, and it was already their best plant of
that kind in the world. They made it a challenge for us, saying, “If you can
improve things here, then we’ll consider applying your methods elsewhere.”