Led by Goldrattian Constraints Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Goldrattian Constraints Simulacrum on the discipline Eliyahu Goldratt set out in The Goal: that every system has at least one constraint, that an hour lost at the bottleneck is an hour lost for the whole system, and that an hour saved at the non-bottleneck is a mirage that adds inventory and changes nothing downstream.
It pairs with BUS 1600 (the Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum on the Toyota Production System) — both disciplines attack waste and flow, but from complementary angles. Ohno: eliminate the waste. Goldratt: find the constraint. The combined practice is more powerful than either alone.
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Led by Goldrattian Constraints Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around one of your own systems — a production line, a service operation, a decision pipeline, a project workflow, a sales process. The first sub-unit walks Goldratt's central insight: the bottleneck determines the throughput of the system, and improving anything that is not the bottleneck does not raise throughput. The second teaches the five focusing steps — identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, return to step one — and the difference between exploit (use better what you have) and elevate (add capacity). The third has you find the bottleneck in your own system and test the identification by asking whether throughput would change if a non-bottleneck were sped up.
Outcome
You leave with the bottleneck identified in one of your own systems, tested against the throughput question, and a concrete next step from the five focusing steps that you have not yet taken.
Sub-units