I know we’re a day earlier than we announced, but Bruce and I are anxious for everyone to see parts of our book. So, as promised, for the next couple of months Bruce and I are going to share the Preface and Chapter 1 of our new book, Epiphanized – A Business Novel About Integrating the Theory of Constraints, Lean and Six Sigma (TLS). The title of the published book may change as the final copy moves forward, but the content will not be much different than what we share with you. We invite your comments and look forward to the book’s release.
Preface Part 1 for Epiphanized©
A book by Bob Sproull and Bruce Nelson
How many times have you started reading a book, and you weren’t sure of what the author was actually writing about? You read their words, but since the subject is new to you, you want to be sure you’ve grasped the intent. So what do you do when you’re faced with this situation? Do you put down your book and go to a familiar search engine and try to find information about the subject in question on the internet? Or maybe you go to your own personal library of books and try to find out more on the subject? Whatever you end up doing, it is troublesome or maybe even upsetting because it takes time away from your reading and causes an obvious break in the flow of information or the story line. We also have experienced this situation, so when we decided to write this book, we considered this scenario and how we might be able to neutralize it or reduce the effects of the interference. What if we were able to write a story and have the reference material contained within the same narrative? We thought so too so we have added appendixes to make it easier. Using appendixes at the end of the book certainly won’t totally alleviate the problem of having to search for reference material, but it may save some of your valuable time and preserve the flow of new information.
Our book is written primarily in a novel format that tells a business story, weaving in an assortment of well-known and not-so-well-known tools and techniques. Some of these tools and techniques may be new to some of you, depending upon your experience and frame of reference. The book is primarily focused on an improvement methodology known as the “Theory of Constraints (TOC).” In writing this book, it is our hope that we will have demonstrated to the reader that TOC, by itself, is not the only improvement methodology to drive significant bottom line improvement. In fact, the best results can be achieved by the integration of TOC with two other popular methodologies known as “Lean” and “Six Sigma.” If done correctly, using all three methods should result in significant financial returns. So as we tell our story, we use several appendixes to provide more detail and rigor on the subjects presented.
As an example, one of the subjects presented in our book is the TOC Replenishment Model. In the business novel portion of our book, we demonstrate how this concept was used to eliminate stock-outs of parts while significantly reducing the dollar value of the parts inventory. In the appendix for this subject, we provide additional detail on how this model can be implemented and used within your own organization.
Our next posting will describe in a bit more detail what this book is about and then we’ll present Chapter 1 and introduce some of the characters. We hope you enjoy our book and that you’ll leave us comments about your experience.
Bob and Bruce
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