The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: Why did this approach work where others had failed?
RL: We had looked at a lot of the project management solutions, including
material resource planning (MRP). TOC was the one that worked from all
dimensions; building teamwork, understanding variability, and with a
grounding in scientific thought. It was a holistic approach to solving the
problems. It looked at the entire system and said, hey, once you find the key
leverage point you’ll get some significant returns. And then you can go back
and find the next leverage point, or constraint.
DW: Did it take you a long time to find the constraint?
RL: No, it didn’t. And within about 120 days we were already beginning to
see the results.
DW: What was the constraint that you found?
RL: It was the schedule—the way the schedule was developed. The biggest
thing was the way we applied available resources; it didn’t make any sense.
The estimators and evaluators really had about two days worth of work and
they were taking about 14. We figured out what was going on—why that was
a problem, why the scheduler set that up—and then reorganized.
DW: Bottom line?
RL: Well, the way it worked with the government, we were funded for a
certain number of airplanes each year. We started burning through the
backlog and we actually produced a few extra airplanes. I know from talking
to the new commanding officer down there that they’ve increased the amount
of product every year as they’ve gone forward.
DW: And you had another example?
RL: I also implemented TOC in the tail rotor blade cell at Sikorsky Aircraft,
the overhaul and repair division. We were averaging somewhere between 15

---

and 19 tail rotor blades a month. It took us about 73 days to finish a tail rotor
blade and we had as many as 75 or 80 tail rotor blades in flow. Well, we
changed the flow to more than 30 tail rotor blades in process, which means
our turnaround time actually was about 28 days.