Theory of Constraints – TOC – The Goal – Eliyahu M. Goldratt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0566086654/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1297223569&sr=8-3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints

Great book on Theory of Constraints told as a piece of fiction with a story of a Production Manager who is always expediting jobs.

At the end of the book the ‘hero’ asks the consultant, paraphrased here ‘.. and would you have not been able to have told these conclusions at the beginning’
The answer to this was that no, if he had done that then you would never truly understood the solution. Too many paradigm shifts to work through.

TOC includes bottleneck management and line-balancing.

The underlying premise of Theory of Constraints is that organizations can be measured and controlled by variations on three measures: throughput, operational expense, and inventory. Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales. Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput