TOCICO

Dafydd Ridout-Jones and Ryan Griffiths share lessons from two years of applying Theory of Constraints across three factories rather than treating TOC as a one-off process improvement. Before adoption, improvement priorities competed for attention, local optimization was common, shared engineering and support resources were stretched across many requests, and urgent issues often drove activity more than system impact. Surging demand increased the need for focus, better flow, and more throughput without significant capital investment. Their implementation begins with people. Awareness training, internal success stories, external examples, and early wins created understanding before behavior change was expected. The Dice Game was especially useful for demonstrating variability and dependency and for creating first-hand ""light bulb"" moments that challenged the belief that familiar operating behaviors were automatically best. Once a system constraint was established, the factories gained one clear operational priority and a shared language: a minute lost at the constraint is a minute lost for the whole system. Buffer management then moved from static WIP quantities to strategically positioned, actively monitored buffers around the constraint. Buffer status began to drive operational discussions and escalation. TOC was also combined with other improvement approaches. In one X-Ray operation, SMED reduced average trolley changeover time from 8.1 minutes to 4 minutes. The deck shows trolleys processed per shift increasing from 23 to 29, products X-rayed from 280 to 350, and throughput per shift rising from about £23,883 to £29,854. Another example challenged labor-utilization thinking: an additional operator costing roughly £350-400 per shift and utilized only about 50% could enable approximately £6,000 of additional throughput per shift by supporting the constraint. The team also learned to verify the constraint with data rather than assumption and redesigned daily stand-up meetings so constraint quality and performance are discussed first. The deck reports an initial 90-day implementation producing about a 60% increase in output. Factories 2 and 3 later reported output increases up to 200%, with a stated minimum 75% increase across multiple product lines. The longer-term objective is to develop TOC champions across leadership, operations, engineering, continuous improvement, and planning so TOC becomes organizational capability rather than knowledge held by a few individuals.