2015 TOCICO Conference - Catch Phrases

Every TOC event I go to blesses me with a lot of new knowledge and ideas. It also adds some 1-liners and catch phrases. When I capture them here, in the blog, not only can you all enjoy them with me, I can also recall them years later and put them to use (like the ones here). So, here are some of the things I collected during the 2015 Annual TOCICO conference:

• "War Room" - don't talk about yesterday (to the 3rd point after the decimal), talk about tomorrow!
• Fear of the unknown drives us to act according to detailed (and mistaken) forecasts.
• Sales comply with Pareto Law, inventory does not.
• The bigger the range, the bigger the tail.
• People claim (as in "market research shows") they are willing to pay a bigger premium for instantaniety than for technological improvement.
• In fashion, the product life cycle is shorter than the supply time.
• Any business based on forecast is fragile (refer to my previous post on anti-fragile)
• Orthodoxy - anything done without knowing why.
• IVD (Inventory Value Days - what do you know, some countries don't use the UD$ currency, go figure) = stuck, unworking capital (you knew that).
• Risk is uncertainty against an objective
• Risk management should be applied on the weakest link.
• Start with Flow - before applying 5 Focusing Steps check that the constraint is the real cause of delays/blocks in flow.
• Operational Goal - meet demand (at peak, not just on average) effectively and efficiently.
• If you are not testing what you are thinking - you are not thinking like a scientist.
• A cluttered mind is an obstacle to thinking.
• The indicators must subordinate to the goal.
• The goal and the necessary conditions must measure alignment as well as progress.
• Variability in the #1 enemy of flow.
• We need simple systems that can handle complexity.
• Systems are variability amplifiers.
• Forecasts are valuable for mid to long term planning, not day-to-day operations.
• Incoming "Peaks" are not forecasts.
• Buffers decouple supply and demand.
• Come your customer from will, not from need, you can not create trust when you are needy.
• Strategy - a project portfolio of things that need to be done by the time we are planning for.
• It is management's responsibility to create the automatic machine.

So, which one is your favorite? Please share.

Let me know if there is any point you feel needs more elaboration.

What's so bad with a flow line?

I've got some more to write about the time I spent in Kiev, but it is so amazing how much 3.5 days away can disrupt the flow of life - I am still trying to get on top of things. So until I settle down, I took a couple of minutes to dig this advertisement up in YouTube (no link, you's all know where it's at). I like looking over advertisements since you can find great examples for different things and somebody else payed to get them done at high quality...

Here is a lovely ad from Visa, that manages to explain why the flow line can't handle variation. This is why Henry Ford said his famous "They can have a car in any color they want as long as it is a black Ford Model T" (I may have re-phrased the original), this was not a personal idiosyncrasy, but rather a basic fact of life that the factory he had built to be so efficient as to allow a car for every worker was based on a flow line and could not support any variety greater than 1.

BTW, there is another instance of this clip on YouTube claiming it demonstrated TOC manufacturing. Of course it does not, since TOC (as explained by Dr. Goldratt in "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants") will only advocate a flow line where it can fit, and the way the process is set up in the clip, it can't since not all customers can be served without compromising something (the process or customer satisfaction). Now in this artificial example only a very small change is needed to fix the issue. What would you change here?




Edited to add:
I've been going through my old posts and found this one about the train that never stops. Can you see a difference between the two systems?