TOC for Distribution

The Proceedings of ICM 2007 is a 626 pages long document that has 2 TOC related

articles. I'll review "Distribution the TOC Way: Review and a Case Study" which you can find in page 158 (using the reader's page count), the other article is about Critical Chain in semiconductors and I'll review it in another post.

The article covers the basics - common UDE's, the cloud they lead to and the generic solution and then gives a case study of a European apparel retailer with very little details.

I found the introduction of the problem on hand very good, clear and easy to understand. Later on the article became less clear, in my opinion.

 Another thing to consider here is "Is batching always a bad thing?" - probably not, it can be good if it helps you get more out of a CCR (capacity constraint resource) for example, but it should be minimized. If so - are there other places where you are batching? Maybe you are batching in sales - using one sales person to sell all your product lines? Un-batching the sales force will allow sales people to gain more expertise with the products they are selling because they have more focus. There might be other benefits for such a move, but there are perils as well so the use of a full thinking process, especially the Negative Branch Reservation, is important.