About this Presentation
In La Bugueña: Sostenibilidad, Disponibilidad y Rentabilidad con TOC, Mario Alberto Hernández Moncada presents the transformation of La Bugueña, a Colombian food manufacturer, through the practical application of Theory of Constraints.
Rather than presenting TOC as a collection of separate tools, Mario shows how the company connected its decisions to a single Goal Tree centered on increasing ROI. The case follows four major branches: improving profitability, increasing capacity at the lowest practical cost, accelerating the cash-conversion cycle, and building long-term sustainability. Across these areas, Mario demonstrates how La Bugueña applied the Five Focusing Steps, cause-and-effect logic, injections, buffer-based flow management, and Critical Chain practices to make investment and operating decisions.
The results are substantial. The company redesigned a plant expansion to reduce unnecessary investment, brought a project estimated at three months into operation in 23 days, improved flow and inventory performance, and reduced the average cash conversion cycle from 18.5 to 6.1 days. By September 2026, La Bugueña reported ROCE of 41.8%, ahead of its 37.3% target, alongside strong gains in EBITDA, net profit, and sales.
The presentation also makes sustainability part of the system rather than a separate initiative, covering long-term supplier relationships, employee development, community programs, environmental investments, and corporate governance.
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
Mario shows how La Bugueña connected multiple improvement efforts to one clear goal: increasing company ROI. The case is organized through a Goal Tree with four major branches—profitability, capacity, cash-cycle speed, and sustainability—so individual actions are tied back to one system objective rather than managed as disconnected initiatives.
The profitability branch combines sales growth, higher gross profitability, and disciplined expense growth. Mario explains that La Bugueña focused on selling more, improving raw-material economics, negotiating win-win with suppliers, reducing labor and factory overhead, and ensuring expenses grow more slowly than gross profitability.
The capacity case demonstrates the TOC principle of exploiting before elevating. As plant utilization approached its protective limit, La Bugueña first redesigned the expansion to eliminate unnecessary investment, ultimately operating the project in 23 days and at 65% of the cost of outsourcing the work on a turnkey basis.
Flow improvement produced measurable working-capital and service results. Using a TOC-based flow system and buffer logic, La Bugueña reduced its average cash conversion cycle from 18.5 days in 2023 to 6.1 days in 2025, while managing service around a 97% target and using penetration causes to drive ongoing improvement.
Instructor(s)
