1. The goal of manufacturing organization is to make money. Everything else we do is a means to achieve the goal.
2. Productivity action is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal.
3. Throughput (T) is the rate the system generates money through sales, not production. Inventory (I) is the total money invested in purchasing things intended to sell. Operational Expense (OE) is the money spent to turn inventory into throughput.
4. A bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. A non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.
5. Ensure that whatever is being fed into the bottleneck is free of defects. By doing this, you ensure that you're not wasting the valuable bottleneck resource by using it to process material that will later be discarded.
Assign the most productive team members and technology to the bottleneck process
Add capacity in the bottleneck process.
6. The Theory of Constraints is elegantly simple.
Identify the constraint: The weakest link that limits the system’s capacity. The system’s efficiency, the system’s throughput rate, the system’s cost, is defined solely by the weakest link. It may be a physical or behavioral constraint. Look for piles of built-up inventory Exploit the constraint: Use 100%. Maximize the performance of the constraint. That pace is the heartbeat of the operation. Usually, there are multiple steps