Read Part 1

06 January 2016, Jelena Fedurko

I got a clarification for the riddle as presented in Part 1:

“Just one big BUT!! There is a resource conflict. The process engineers in the factories are responsible for both types of projects. New products require new/modified processes. Existing products require improvements – speed, quality, capacity, cost … and also require process engineers. YES, there are product development resources and they are a different set. The conflict arises when the new product is qualified for sale and must be industrialized in the factory. It is in the factory where the conflict occurs.

It is a ‘conflict’ between the factory and product development because the factory delays product industrialization for their factory reasons (local optimization). The product development people often face a question ‘Why should we speed up only to have to wait for the factory to do their part. It feels like the army … hurry up, and wait?’ “

This comment brings in new understanding of the conflict which is now truly between the product development projects and improvement projects.

Let’s look again at the first part of the clarification to the conflict:

“The process engineers in the factories are responsible for both types of projects. New products require new/modified processes. Existing products require improvements – speed, quality, capacity, cost … and also require process engineers. […] The conflict arises when the new product is qualified for sale and must be industrialized in the factory. It is in the factory where the conflict occurs.”

If we go along with the claim that there is a resource conflict, and based on the statements “The process engineers in the factories are responsible for both types of projects” and “It is in the factory where the conflict occurs”, the conflict seems to be of factory process engineers and looks like that:

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03 January 2016, Oded Cohen

This graph with the green and red curve belongs to the core of TOC. It is embedded in the logo of TOCPA. It represents the motto of Ever Improve way of managing systems, it shows the point in which managing the constraint is critical for the future of the system, and more messages.

Recently, we have had discussions with some TOC practitioners that expressed some frustration about the progress of their implementations.  They claimed that while the first part of the TOC project produced outstanding results within a few months, the continuation of the growth was not as rapid and not as easy as they have expected it to be.

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