TOCICO

The five steps of focusing are in the core of TOC. When applying them to a production environment that has a permanent and expensive bottleneck step 2 is extremely challenging. The decision of how to exploit the system’s constraint(s) demands a sophisticated production plan. In 1975 Eli Goldratt and his partners built OPT. It was a finite forward scheduling system based on simulation software called SPSS. OPT laid the foundation for TOC. Unfortunately, OPT does not exist any longer. Nearly 40 years later – Emanuele Strada has developed smart production plans by using the same concepts while employing concurrent advanced software. He has built dynamic modeling to demonstrate and simulate the behavior of the production environment not only for the make to order (MTO) but also for make to availability (MTA) regime. It is a unique work. The modeled plan was successfully incorporated into the operation of a mega production facility. The modeling takes into account several factors that complicate any attempt to build a production plan, such as: process steps dependency, process performance variation, material scheduling, process capacity and capability, batch size logic, order due date commitment and more. These factors and their interdependencies are considered together with time! The dynamic process modelling enables the learning of the behavior of the system under the above factors and analyzing the assumptions behind the suggested solutions. It reduces the risk of implementation failure and predicts and boosts the effectiveness of the proposed solution in a specific environment. The presentation outlines the parameters and considerations that should be used for building such plans.