The Constraints Of Constraint Management

Identify the system’s constraint itself. Learning that the true constraint is often a lack of availability of a specific skill or piece of equipment is helpful in quickly identifying the constraint, and the manager is encouraged to continually ask “why” to diagnose the constraint.

The company needs to distribute stock from the warehouse to the stores every week, and costs will be incurred in doing so. Since NEXT has decreased in non-current assets; in particular Property, Plant and equipment, they would need to increase the productivity and space in order to operate in warehouses and distribute stock out to additional stores nationwide. Therefore, costs will be incurred when training the work force, and in order to meet the demands of consumers, wages and salaries will increase in time.

For example if Tesco’s was making a new product and they were given a limited amount of money to invest in this product, this would limit how advanced this product and how useful this product would end up to be. A constraint for tescos would be the price war, all supermarkets, retailers etc want the best prices for their customers and

14. A decision to work closely with a limited number of suppliers for the purpose of ensuring that the proper materials are available at the optimal time is an example of:

Resource constraint: If a resource is shared by many projects or activities, it would be used in order of priority, thus leading to delay of activity or project with lower priority.

Alex comes up with the consensus that the “Goal” of his business and many others is to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment and their cash flow at the plant. This basically means to make money. These three measurements can be achieved by looking closer into his second set of measurements. Alex specifically must find a way to increase throughput while at the same time decreasing it inventory and operational expenses. All three of these measurements must be cautiously monitored since they all rely on each other to be obtained in balance. Factors that cause throughput, inventory, and operational expenses to become unbalanced are excess manpower and balance capacity of the demand of resources in the market.

2) Since substantial amount of funds are locked in the form of the inventory the company’s growth is hindered in terms of expanding business by means of wine merchandising.

Alex Rogo was tasked with a very difficult job by his superior, Mr. Peach. He had to get the production plant efficient and profitable or it would be closed in three months due to poor results. Lucky for Alex, he enlisted the help of his old physics professor, Jonah. Through Jonah’s advice to Alex, we are able to see the different methods used under the theory of constraints.

With this company the inventory management ratios further indicate that there may be an issue with inventory and inventory controls. The inventory turnover ratio is lower than the industry average and the days’ sales in inventory are high. A company wants to turn inventory quickly to reduce storage costs, and

When considering operational constraints we looked at people, location, premises, equipment, money, materials, other related activities and services.

One of the main concerns during the meeting was the impact of cost and time constraints on networking techniques and project schedules. Under the ideal situation, the project start and end dates are fixed. Adding resources is not usually feasible as it increases cost. There should be a balance between time and cost constraints as it avoids wasting of resources. Also most people are willing to accept that costs could exceed expectations, and might even take a perverse delight in recounting past examples, the same is not true for time constraints. This is probably due to the fact that cost over runs are resolved in-house, while schedule issues are open and visible to the customer. A company has a lot of useful, desirable work that could be done, but has limited and finite resources available with which to do that work. Choices have to be made about which work to do and how to allocate resources. This leads to constraints especially, the time constraint and the cost constraint. Time, in project management, is analyzed down to its smallest detail. Each and every component of the project is analyzed with respect to the time required for completion. After completion of this analysis these components are broken down even further into the time required to do each task.

By resolving these issues, we can come up with a recommendation that will justify the Sales Department’s need to adjust the current selling prices of their products.

There are constraints on capacity management and these are normally Time and Capacity. Time may be a constraint where a customer has a particular required delivery date. In this situation, capacity managers often "plan backwards". In other words, they allocate the final stage (operation) of the production tasks to the period where delivery is required; the penultimate task one period earlier and so on. This process helps identify whether there is sufficient time to meet the production demands and whether capacity needs to be increased, albeit temporarily.

with a number of strategic issues facing a capital-intensive, mature industry. Their product costing system was

3. Ruhl, Jack M; "The theory of constraints within a cost management framework ", Journal of Cost Management; Boston; Nov/Dec 199