TOCICO

Phil Snelgrove asks a practical organizational-change question that often sits behind TOC implementation: when poor performance is created by rules, measures and behaviours spanning many departments, who actually has the authority and responsibility to change them? Drawing on more than two decades of implementation experience at Goldratt UK, he begins with recurring challenge patterns across operations, project environments, supply chains, maintenance, warehousing and engineering. In operations, the diagnostic pattern starts with resources, equipment and materials working out of alignment. Organizations respond by increasing WIP, queues grow, lead times lengthen, delayed orders become urgent, priorities change, output is interrupted and OTIF falls. In projects, pressure to launch more work and tolerate changing scope creates too many open projects and tasks, more rework, resource contention, multitasking, task overruns and late projects. In supply and logistics, stockouts and slow movers develop into shortages, low OTIF, expedites, high transport costs, overstocks, high inventory, obsolete SKUs and cash and space tied up. The symptoms appear local, but the cause-and-effect chains cross organizational boundaries. Snelgrove separates the people who appear to “own” the problems from the functions that often control parts of the solution. Procurement, production, planning, project managers, resource managers, warehousing, logistics, sales and customer service may experience the effects, while IT, finance and metrics, continuous improvement, change management and senior management control rules or infrastructure needed for a fix. The result is a system-level issue with no single departmental owner. The presentation argues that TOC applications are known: Rules of Flow and Drum-Buffer-Rope for operations, Critical Chain for projects, and decoupling, buffering and constraint focus for supply chain, MRO, warehousing, engineering, sales and marketing. The harder requirement is changing processes, measures, house rules and behaviours so exploitation and subordination work across the whole system. Top managers cannot do this alone; organizational change requires alignment and shared system understanding. Snelgrove closes with conditions for success drawn from experience: dedicate enough time - measured in days - to align the management team, get the right people in the room, spend more time understanding the problem than designing the solution, actively use reservations to strengthen the approach, document assumptions and decisions, and bring in capable facilitators or experts when needed. His answer to the title question is deliberately collective: “It takes all of us.”