TOCICO

This is a story about how Hitachi overcame various resistances against any change including its TOC implementation. Hitachi is a Japan-based manufacturing conglomerate establish in 1910. Its business line includes power plant, power grid, rail, information and telecommunication, construction machinery, automotive component, home appliance, metal, chemical and financial services. The number of employees exceeds 300,000. The very first successful implementation of DBR in Japan was realized by Hitachi Tool, a Hitachi group company. The program started in 2000 and their successful outcome includes 65% reduction in production lead time and 200% increase in cash flow. While this result was introduced by Dr. Goldratt to the world, no other business unit or division followed. In 2008, Hitachi developed new methodology Ex-Approach for planning and requirement analysis phase of information system development. This methodology is the comprehensive body of knowledge and consists from TOC-TP as its foundation, Experience Design, and various frameworks, tools and techniques specific to these processes. This Ex-Approach enabled us to resize actual and robust win-win relationship by and between the IT user and IT service provider, which we were longing for but merely realized. However, it requires continuous and material effort to overcome resistance until this new methodology became the Hitachi standard. (Ex approach was presented at TOCICO 2014.) In 2012, Hitachi started new initiative to implement the TOC FLOW application in various business units and factories. In despite of material effort and money invested, the outcome from this initiative for the first year was miserable. Learning from this failure, we changed the implementation and communication strategy to accelerate our initiative. the presentation is also about the effort to overcome the resistance and ignorance against new change or methodology. (A part of the new communication strategy was presented at TOCICO 2016). Our implementation required more than 2 years' continuous effort, finally we realized meaningful outcomes including: DDP improved to 90%+ from less than 50%( s-DBR: MTO): 20+% reduction in lead time / 30%+ reduction in Inventory (s-DBR for long touch time: MTO); DDP improved to 95%+ from 60%+ while significant reduction of overtime (TP / WIP board / CCPM: ETO); 100% DDP for 3 years (TP/CCPM : IT project); and included 10 business units and 5 factories. Based on such meaningful outcomes, at this moment, more than 300 teams are commited to POOGI. Our TP education program for 30,000 employees was launched in January 2018. It is obvious that TOC will realize significant improvement. This presentation intends to share our experience about the resistance and ignorance against any change including ours TOC implementation, and our effort to overcome both resistance and ignorance. Our story includes a lot of lessons learned and insights which gives an idea of how to accelerate a TOC implementation. The most important learning is Before talking about solutions, we must understand the reality of their operation, with sympathy to their UDEs. This is also a story that TOC supports people to think clearly. People who think clearly will make meaningful changes and outcomes. Video length: . PDF: slides.