Article 17

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Let me start with a simple example. It has massive implications.

Look at a steel chain shown in Figure 1.

Here are a few trivial quiz questions:

Here are answers couched in scientific terms:

This is a simple example of Theory of Constraints, TOC for short, invented by an Israeli, Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

Goldratt(1947-2011) was an entrepreneur, programmer and a physicist who was working on optimization algorithms and looked at the programming code to determine where the code is making next iterative improvement. He recognized that the optimization code consistently made an incremental improvement at the “weakest” link. To explain his insights, Goldratt wrote and published several books: The Goal, Critical Chain, It is not Luck, Theory of Constraints, Race, Haystack Syndrome, and a few others.

Goldratt says, if you have an assembly line, and you want to improve its production rate, you need to find the “weakest link,” the limiting resource, the rate limiting step, or bottleneck and figure out how to increase the rate of that limiting step. He also goes on to say, if instead, you apply a resource anywhere else, it is a wasted resource. He further generalizes that to say, on any assembly line, resources that are not applied at the bottleneck step, must remain idle for some time until the bottleneck resource catches up! Management finds this scary, “Eliyahu, do you mean we need to deliberately keep most of the resources idle and non-productive?”