John Maher, Synchrono Manufacturing Software

Using TOC, Lean and Six Sigma to Become More Demand-Driven

What Tools to Use to Get the Most of Your Demand-Driven Changes Last time, we looked at specific companies that I have worked with and how they became more demand-driven using the Theory of Constraints (TOC) as a first step. As you saw from these real-life examples, TOC works well as a pointer to see where you need to change – and what should be the first items on the

Three Ways to Use Big Data to Understand Your Customers

How effective marketers use customer intelligence data to build relationships Marketers have more connected data to work with these days– but many of us struggle to find a place to put it to use. The Internet of Things has delivered unprecedented visibility and connectivity between: Sales data (what leads yield results and why?) Customer data (who is your customer and where do they go to learn about your products?) Product

Life Hack 101: Doing Implementation Documentation Right

The Who, When, What and Where for a Solid Project Doc Strategy Imagine if your most important photos—your child’s first birthday party, the day you brought home your new dog, that awesome vacation in Europe—were all lost forever. Your computer fell into the bathtub or the hard drive was wiped by an electrical storm, and you didn’t back up your drive. Don’t

When Manufacturing Improvements Have Too High a Price

Engineering design fiascos – spending thousands to save pennies This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. It’s meant to illustrate how using constraints-based thinking can uncover the hidden price of cost-cutting projects. Several years ago, a friend of mine was working in the quality group at a large automotive company. We will call

Three Bottlenecks the Modern Marketer Must Overcome

How a manufacturing theory helps Jeff Bezos—and you—focus on what really matters The Week recently ran a story about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos making all of his senior managers read, The Goal, by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox. So why would Jeff Bezos – widely considered one of the most visionary CEOs today —want his team to buy into a business book’s philosophy that’s mostly concerned with manufacturing

How TOC Can Move Your World – and World View

Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough, a fulcrum, and a place to stand, and I shall move the world.” Learn how production professionals use Constraints Management to meet negativity head – on to manage meaningful change Here’s the last part of our three-part series about the Theory of Constraints (TOC). In the next couple of postings I’m going to dig right in to looking at what