TLS - TOC, Lean & Six Sigma

Alan Mulally is a brilliant engineer who led historic transformations as CEO of Boeing Commercial and then Ford Motor Company. But just as important as what he accomplished, is how he accomplished it. His people first, inclusive approach to leadership not only created great products and successful companies, but also created an organization people wanted to be a part of.

The Logical Thinking Process and its tools are used to solve complex system-level problems. Bill Dettmer is a recognized world expert in this field, he refined and improved the Logical Thinking Process and is author of several books on this subject.

Although many have studied the Toyota Product Development System, few understood it as well as Allen.

I have added a new element to my original UIC concentric circles, first introduced in my book, The Ultimate Improvement Cycle [1], with that being your expected TLS deliverables. The figure [above] is that third concentric circle.

KataCon5 celebrates 5 years, Mike Rother's Toyota Kata 10 years, Jeff Liker's Toyota Way 15 years, and Rother's Learning to See 20 years. Join Rother, Liker, and the entire Kata community for a great time of learning, networking, and perhaps a surprise or two as we celebrate these significant milestones! See you in Savannah!

Conference: “How to quickly become a much better manufacturer than your competitors?” in Vilnius, Lithuania on 30th of April 2013. This was part of the Supply Chain Conference organized by TOC Sprendimai and Verslo Zinios. Part 1 is a brief presentation of the concepts of the Theory of Constraints and Part 2 presents two case studies. The first case is an automotive OEM supplier in Mexico. It involves injecting Theory Of Constraints (TOC) into a very Lean system to very rapidly improve the factory’s performance. The second is a luxury perfume bottle manufacturer in France that rapidly boosted its performance by using a combination of TOC, Lean and Six Sigma. It is probably one of the first full implementations of “TLS” (TOC + Lean + Six Sigma). The presentation (in English) is by Philip Marris.

 In the world of “Continuous Improvement” there are numerous competing methodologies. In any given business environment, it wouldn’t be uncommon to hear “We use the Toyota Production System” or “We follow the DMAIC process”. Each of these approaches have their army of management consultants, who often add their own unique nuances to the approach and are always happy to tell you why theirs’s is best. For the sake of keeping this post readable we are going to limit the scope of conversation to what I call “The big three” or Lean, Six Sigma and Theory of Constraints. To all the master black belt practitioners out there, the intent here is to provide the 30,000ft view not an exhaustive textbook. So, please forgive any oversimplification.