I have to comment on Pascal Van Cauwenberghe's interesting post on the conflict between Lean's focus on reducing waste and TOC's focus on improving the bottleneck in a process flow. I feel that Pascal's post is based on a misunderstanding of the Five Focusing Steps in TOC. The 3rd step tells us to "subordinate the rest of the system to the decision in step 2" and step 2 "decide how to exploit the bottleneck."

What is generally misunderstood here is that the exploitation of the bottleneck nearly always involves changes elsewhere in the process or system. These changes often involve the elimination of waste because no one wants the waste to be processed through the constraint. In addition, subordination almost always involves the removal of policies that create waste. [Note: Eli Goldratt no longer uses the term "policy constraints", policies that affect the performance of the bottleneck are outdated subordination decisions and must be changed in the subordination step.] I demonstrated these ideas recently by taking an updated version of my XIT Sustained Engineering paper from the TOCICO in Barcelona to the Lean Design and Development conference and recasting all the exploitation and subordination steps as waste reduction instead. [So I guess I have to post that presentation up now, huh? another day perhaps] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, TOC, Lean