The New Beginning Part 6

 Part 6 is a continuation of my blog series on Matt Hutcheson and my new book, The New Beginning. This book is written as a business novel and is a sequel to my last book, The Secret to Maximizing Profitability.

In Chapter 17, entitled The Board Meeting, Tom attends a meeting with the Board of Directors with his intention to provide an update on the four company’s performance metrics.  He presents the update and clearly there has been improvements to all of them.  He then presents Simpson’s Goal Tree, their assessment, future improvement efforts and then a future assessment.  The four improvement efforts included implementation of Drum Buffer Rope, TOC’s Replenishment Solution, Throughput Accounting and his very own, Ultimate Improvement Cycle methodology.  The Board then surprises Tom by offering him a new consulting agreement whereby he would assist the Board on whether or not they should purchase new companies.

 In Chapter 18, entitled Maximo’s Improvement Effort, Tom intends to follow-up on two presentations he has already made, namely Drum Buffer Rope and possibly TOC’s Replenishment Solution.  Although he had already presented both of these improvement initiatives, he wanted to do a follow-up session, especially on Drum Buffer Rope, just to make sure the teams understood everything necessary to do, in order to successfully implement both parts.  In this session, Tom presented new details of Drum Buffer Rope and sent the team on a fact-finding mission to answer some unresolved questions.

In Chapter 19, entitled Drum Buffer Rope at Maximo, Tom had scheduled another follow-up meeting to discuss more on Drum Buffer Rope.  As he was ready to begin, Dr. Samuels entered the room and asked for permission to say a few words.  To everyone’s surprise, Dr. Samuels let everyone know that the hospital board had decided to implement the team’s recommendations on discharge policy changes and their housekeeping efforts, which pleased everyone.  The team then presented three more recommendations on how to reduce hospital wait times.  Tom finished the day with a new idea on Multiple Drum Buffer Rope for a hospital’s Emergency Department and presented a drawing of his idea.

In Chapter 20, entitled Simpson Water Heater’s New Initiative, Tom flies into Detroit to present the Theory of Constraints Replenishment Solution.  Even though he had touched on this solution in another visit, in this trip he would present the details of how it works.  He explains the pitfalls of using the Min/Max system which Simpson currently uses, with these pitfalls being excessive amounts of inventory while seeing regular examples of part’s stock-outs.  He then delivers the key messages associated with TOC’s Replenishment Solution with results being fifty plus percent reduction in inventory volume while stock-outs fall to nearly zero.

My next post will be the final post of my blog series on Matt Hutcheson and my new book, The New Beginning. This book is written as a business novel and is a sequel to my last book, The Secret to Maximizing Profitability.

Bob Sproull