Description

Hub Huddles are an opportunity for manufacturing leaders to share, on a peer-to-peer basis, best practices for growth and strategies to overcoming challenges.

Theory of Constraints: Making More Profits without Hiring More People
Presented by Mike Willett, CIRAS Project Manager 

The Theory of Constraints is a business management approach for manufacturers that identifies and controls those things in a business that limit the company’s ability to achieve its goals. Join us for the next Hub Huddle that includes a one-hour live simulation that compares the financial performance of five common manufacturing philosophies and improvement methods. 

The simulation creates a value stream with four processes – each with an operator, a supervisor over the line, and an accountant that keeps track of the data. Each operator rolls dice to determine hourly capacity then moves that number of blocks through the process. Each block has a raw material cost and a final sales price, while we’ve defined a given labor and overhead expense for every 10-hour shift. At the end of each shift, the financial performance of each scenario is calculated. Then, we evaluate the five scenarios:

1. A totally balanced line with all four processes having equal capacity.
2. A balanced line with variation.
3. A balanced line with a constraint in the process.
4. A balanced line with a constraint and pull manufacturing implemented.
5. A balanced line with a constraint, pull, and an exploited constraint.

Each shift is stopped halfway through to ask the supervisor questions based on what they see. The whole process takes one hour, including discussion.

Who should attend?
This is typically a great short-term, educational event designed to generate a lot of improvement thoughts related to system design. Although geared for training purposes for all levels of manufacturing management, it can be easily transferred to the management of any company that uses a sequential step-by-step approach to delivering a product or service.

About our speaker:
Mike Willett has spent the past 23 years helping companies improve their bottom lines as a Productivity Project Manager for Iowa State University’s Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS). Before joining CIRAS, Mike spent 20 years working in manufacturing in jobs such as vice president of operations and production management, quality control, and manufacturing engineering. He has a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology and a master’s degree in industrial supervision and management. Mike also is a certified Lean instructor and a Theory of Constraints Jonah.
 

Leading Organizations: