The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: Have you thought about what the next constraint will be?

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DH: Of course, at present there is still a market for further independent
financial advisors to join us. There are about 25,000 of these people in the
UK and we have less than 1000 of them. Now the quality of some of those
25,000, and the fact that not everybody will join us in any case, means at
some point the effort needed to increase the capacity just won’t be worth it
versus the energy we could put into something else. At that point, you say,
“We’ve now changed our plan. What is the constraint in our new plan?”
Frankly, it’s about retaining the clients’ money. At present what we do is
introduce clients to a variety of manufacturers of financial services. The
money goes to the manufacturers and they give some of it back to us in the
form of commissions or fees. The next step really is for the clients to give us
the money, and for us then to give some of it to the fund managers and the
life insurers. So once we’re a certain size, the constraint will begin to move.
We’ll have a brand, and the revenue needed to communicate that brand, so
there won’t be quite as much effort to get people to join us. At that point the
constraint shifts.

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Interview with Dr. Antoine Van Gelder

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A South African Hospital,
University of Pretoria
DW: You’re not a typical Eli Goldratt disciple, are you?
AV: I’m a university professor with a dual appointment, head of the
department of internal medicine at the University of Pretoria and head of the
department of internal medicine at Pretoria Academic Hospital. In 1992 I got
an invitation to attend one of Eli Goldratt’s courses in Pretoria. Not one run
by him, himself, but by a subsidiary of the Goldratt Institute. At that time I
knew nothing about Theory of Constraints and I had not read 
The Goal
. I got
myself into this out of curiosity more than anything else.