Résumé de la théorie des contraintes (document en anglais).

The Theory Of Constraints

1. Introduction

The ongoing improvement is the most important strategic process that each enterprise is looking for.But, how the top management can lead his enterprise to gain improvement? What are the necessary tools for obtaining better results from activity? How to understand the core of the problem, define the strategy and implement it?

All those questions can be answered by a methodology called “Theory of Constraints (TOC)”. TOC was performed by DrGoldratt in the 80’s, it was developed some years later, and by creating the Goldratt Institute, the TOC was expanded all over the world.

Of course the TOC was declined to many specialties, we have now:

Critical Chain : For projects management.

Throughput accounting : For accounting with the concept of throughput.

Thinking Process : The most innovative tools in the domain of problems resolution.

This paper is dedicated to explain the principles of the “Thinking Process Tools” those are considered like the most helpful tools to obtain concrete results for any complex situation.

2. The Thinking Process Tools (TP tools)

The TP tools are a package of tools that help users to formalize their ideas in a concise diagrams and then leading them to give ad-hoc solutions and the way to implement them.

Those tools are:

Current Reality Tree.

Evaporating Cloud.

Future Reality Tree.

Prerequisite Tree.

Transition Tree.

1.1. Current Reality Tree

The starting point in the constructing the tree is the identification of the Undesirable Effects (UDE’s).A UDE is defined as something that exists in the reality; it’s negative and compromises the organization for its continued existence.

The first step is identifying the UDE’s, regardless of the sources of the UDE’s, we must only focus on the UDE’s as it defined.

For example, we imagine we are in a department of an establishment and we see some problems caused by others in the organization, first of all, we must identify all UDE’s as entities of the model:

An entity is defined as an element of a causality model, it represent an idea, positive or negative and must be written in the present tense.

After that we must link the entities of the system and add more entities as the process of constructing the CRT.

The ellipse that joins links must be understood like a “and”, in this example we must have in the same time Ent01 and UDE05 for having UDE01.

1.2. Evaporating Cloud

This tree helps user to see clearly the conflict and logically guides him showing the underlying reasons that take the conflict in place. After that he can find the solutions (called in the TOC language, the injections) to bring to the system for solving the core conflict.

1.3.Future

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