Bob Sproull

This is a business novel that tells a success story of implementing Theory of Constraints (TOC) in an ailing company, Barton Enterprise, and turning it around to a prosperous one in a short time. Joe, the newly hired Continuous Improvement Manager, by strange coincident, meets with Connor, a bartender and at the same time a TOC consultant. Connor, whom I consider the main hero of the story, thru Joe and other executives of the company make on-time delivery and profitability skyrocket with the concepts and tools of the TOC.

The novel argues, thru interesting drama events, how prevalent beliefs of manpower efficiency and Cost Accounting are all myths and barriers in the way of real continuous improvement. Whereas focusing on the constraint process and adopting the Throughput Accounting concepts are the saviors for any company to thrive.

The theme of the book is to prove that improvement efforts on nonconstraint processes are all a waste of time as the throughput of the value chain is limited to the bottleneck process; the constraint. Hence, walking thru the 5 focusing steps of TOC is the roadmap to adopt whenever one approaches any improvement project. The only improvement is the one that hits the bottom line of the company, and that is better achieved by increasing the throughput (T).

Almost all tools and techniques of TOC are discussed in the novel. The 5 focusing steps, Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR), Intermediate Objectives Map (IO), Interference Diagram (ID), Systems Thinking Processes, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), and Throughput Accounting. The writers did a good job by sparing about 100 pages of appendices at the end of the book to review these tools separately.

The book is very interesting indeed. It opens one's horizon on how to approach improvement projects. Identify the constraint process, exploit it using Lean and Six Sigma, subordinate other processes to the constraint, then move with the constraint as it rolls over to another process. And the cycle goes on.

I highly recommend this book to professionals eager to understand how to apply TOC in their PI projects.… (mehr)