Theory of Constraints Scenario: A company was loosing customers. Rather than embark on one of the flavor-of-the- month productivity initiatives, and mobilize the whole company, they decided to use a more surgical approach, The Theory of Constraints. Per this approach they asked their employees, “What UnDesirable Effects, UDE’s, are causing us to loose money?” UDE
Input:
Next, we link the above UDE’s (dashed boxes) with other legitimizing, real world, requirements (solid boxes), in a cause-effect-cause…… chain back to the root cause, “We hire temporary workers”. This diagram, called a Current Reality Tree, CRT, is shown below.
Arrows that
have a “doughnut” around them are AND’d,
e.g. IF (A) AND IF (B) AND IF
(C) Then (D)... Current Reality Tree One of the most important benefits of the CRT is its ability not only to define the root cause of our problem but more importantly, to unearth the conflict that has prevented us from solving this problem in the first place. From this CRT we can see that the company is caught in a self-feeding downward spiral of two conflicting requirements, the need for more workers on one hand and cost containment on the other (i.e. not able hire expensive, “more competent” full time employees). Next,
we start to show how we might solve this conflict, or CLOUD. Below we show how to build:
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