Skip to main content.

Theory of Constraints: The Goal

Step 0. Make the goal explicit

Try this fun game at home, in your organisation: ask five people what the goal of the organisation is.

If you're like me, you'll draw blank stares or get conflicting answers. This is really the most difficult of the focusing steps.

When you've got your goals clear, you need to find a way to measure how close your are to your goal. That the Throughput variable of Throughput Accounting.

Remarks:

Can you have more than one goal?

Yes, but you'll need to define a hierarchy of goals. There will come a time when you will be able to improve one goal at the expense of another. Before it comes to that, you need to make sure that everybody knows which goal is more important.

For example: in the simulation we have two goals:

  1. Fold as many hats+boats as possible
  2. Use the least amount of paper
Goal 1 is more important: if we place a buffer before the constraint, we will use more paper, but we will produce more output.

Next step: Identify the constraint

TheGoal It's no coincidence that the first Theory of Constraints book is called "The Goal"...