TOCICO

The goal of the presentation is to explore the road to mass deployments of TOC from the experience of working with 190 small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) in Bogotá, Colombia. The selection criteria for SMEs were sales in US $50,000 to $5 MM; mainly manufacturing; greater than 2 years old. The process design was to defined the goal (strategic and tactic), measurements (TOC finance), what to change (competitive analysis), to what to change (innovation plan), and how to cause the change (TOC solutions: production, distribution, and marketing). The process of ongoing improvement (POOGI) was based on a series of workshops. In most of the companies, no financial manager existed and the only information available was sales and the bank balance. Common problems were no financial judgment, high levels of inventory, late deliveries, low margin sales, few clients, loss of customers, and high production costs. What to change to included finance (judgment on product/service viability), production (choke the release of work), distribution (aligning production to actual demand) and marketing (target market definition and offer design). Results of the interventions are provided. Over 60% of the companies increased sales, throughput and profits significantly. Key learning points include: consulting as a mass product process for SME was useful; the importance of finance and measurements in SMEs and using the thinking processes and first step of the S&T trees were effective.