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Masterminding Supply Chain improvement projects
Supply Chain teams typically work on several improvement projects at any given time. This leads to bad Multitasking by team members and results in delaying all the projects.
If we wish to leverage the available bandwidth of the team, it is important to restrict the number of projects to a manageable few, which have the highest impact.
TOC helps in identifying and prioritizing these projects. It begins with clearly identifying the company goal and the system constraint which is preventing the system from achieving it. Improving the constraint operations provides the highest leverage and the biggest impact. We should try to restrict improvement projects to just exploiting, then elevating the system constraint.
If the team has more bandwidth, it can look at various sub-systems, identify their bottleneck, and apply similar principles to exploit and elevate it. While it is unlikely to have a major impact in the short run, it does ensure that these bottlenecks carry higher protective capacity and don’t become the system constraint in future.