Business Coaching
Some organizations prefer to actively engage in implementing TOC themselves, rather than hiring an external consultant. The Theory of Constraints Institute offers coaching services to guide and support leader-driven implementations.
Choose an Ambitious Target
TOCI coaching is tailored to meet the individual needs of each client. Based on the situation and priorities, the objective vary. For example:
- Grow sales 30%-100% without capital investment
- Turnaround from loss-making to profitable
- Reduce or eliminate debt
- Increase working capital turns significantly
- Crash lead times by 2x-5x
- Avoid bankruptcy/restructuring
- Nurture next generation family business leaders to grow the business to new levels of achievement
- Drastically reduce one's involvement in the business, without reducing the success of the business
- Double profits
Overall Approach
The underlying philosophy and approach driving coaching recommendations will be Theory of Constraints (TOC) holistic management methods developed by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. Other technical and management tools / techniques may also be used from time to time as required to address specific needs.
How Does TOC Help Companies?
- By focusing improvement efforts where they will have greatest impact
- By providing a reliable process that ensures follow through and on-going improvement
The Role of the Client
- Make sincere efforts to accept to feedback, driving necessary changes, and developing robust processes
- Stop doing harmful actions wherever identified
- Persevere - when something simple turns out to be tough to implement
- Gather & prepare data for analysis & decision making
- Update the weekly tracker
- Ensure active participation of team members in weekly review meeting and key initiatives
- Push back when things don’t seem right - you have deep experience and intuition in running the business, please do not underestimate it’s value!
- Keep your antenna up for valid objections and obstacles faced by team members, so that we can work together to address them
The Role of the Business Coach
- To probe, inquire, guide and challenge assumptions
- To maintain an overall roadmap, sequencing and direction for the engagement
- Prepare for interactions, analyze data, create templates/data formats, think and make recommendations
- Facilitate a 90 minute weekly meetings to review progress, discuss analysis, suggest next steps, based on mutually convenient scheduling
- Send weekly emails summarizing agreed actions and next steps, with explanations, formats and analysis where required
- Be available on phone and email (where possible) to assist with an area that the Client is tackling a change/problem/issue, or stuck, etc.
Weekly Tracker
- The Business Coach and Client will jointly develop a tracker to review each week. The purpose of this weekly review is to identify corrective actions and continuously strive to improve vs. the historical 13 week moving average.
- Tracker metrics will include global, holistic measurements such as: Collection, Receivables, Inventory, Throughput, Operating Expenses, Order Book, OTIF, Attrition, New Hires, Safety Incidents, etc.
- The Client may opt to keep this review private or include select top officers of the company. The output of the meeting is a prioritized/coordinated list of actions. This exercise may also help identify harmful measurements/actions/meetings to stop.
Sample Timeframes
Today's business leaders want to see fast results and rapid payback to justify their investment of time and money. Hence, TOCI engagements are designed to yield bottom-line improvement within 13 weeks. Of course, the full impact of improvements will be realized over time, depending upon the focus areas. For example:
- Improve raw material availability (2-4 months)
- Increase On-Time In-Full (OTIF) delivery by 40-50% (4-12 months)
- Evaporate a Cash Constraint (2-6 months)
- Create an un-refusable ‘mafia offer’ to increase prices & margins (12-24 months)
- Eliminate stock-outs (grow sales) in the distribution system (6-12 months)
Ready, Steady... Go?
TOC implementation involves significant changes to various core processes such as scheduling and production control, procurement, finance, HR, IT, marketing, sales and/or distribution (as applicable). It also requires aligning key measurements from the top down.
To achieve the desired results, the senior management must be fully committed to modify their existing way of working as required to cause the change in their organization. Is your organization ready to take on the challenge?
To achieve the desired results, the senior management must be fully committed to modify their existing way of working as required to cause the change in their organization. Is your organization ready to take on the challenge?