China & Taiwan
TOC knowledge in the region of Great China, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan areas is brought and disseminated by Goldratt Schools through active work of Frances Su and Rong Kwei Li in collaboration with the recently established non-profit organization Chinese Goldratt Alliance. The current effort is on making various English articles available in the Chinese languages, and supporting the Goldratt Schools’ trained TOC consultants as requested, while developing opportunities for making the TOC knowledge available to those who need it.
2009 TOC Constraint Management Workshop was held on Feb. 26-27, 2009, in Hsinchu City, Taiwan, for sharing and presenting individual applications of TOC, as well as learning and experience. This event also served as a gathering of the TOC community in the Great China region. The theme of the Workshop was “It is not luck!”, looking into the management philosophy and methods in the Theory of Constraints, in order to go beyond the strategic bottleneck, exploit the operational constraint(s), and proactively enable the continuous improvement. Furthermore, the undertaking of improvement solutions should not only realize the near-term objectives, but also lay down the foundation for moving toward the ever flourishing.
The Workshop included 21 presenters from academia and industry; they shared their learning and applications of TOC in various subject areas, such as hi-tech, consumer goods, component manufacturing, new product development, marketing and sales process, and financial prospect and change issues.
Public seminars and short courses
Continuing on the dissemination effort, public seminars and short courses are periodically organized in conjunction with local universities and non-profit professional societies. Since the past year, the TOC applications related to the inventory management and order on-time delivery have been the main themes. Recently, project management and win-win decision making with the usage of TOC Thinking Process tools have become another focus of attention in the region.
Seminars are usually carried out as one focused subject per day, with using case study presentations and games that illustrate TOC concepts.
Short courses usually cover some applications in 2, 3 or 4 days, depending on the profiles of audience, or the purpose of courses. Sometimes, the webcasting facility are used to overcome the distance among all participants.
For the future months, the tentative plan is to hold seminars in the following topics:
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The collaborative supply chain through the TOC holistic approach - TOC enables the competitive advantage in project-based services
- TOC enables the high performance in Lean/Six Sigma-based companies
- TOC applications in the machine-tool industry
- Win-Win decision making the TOC way
- TOC systems thinking for continuous improvement
- Necessary but not sufficient – software or behavior
- The inherent simplicity in the TOC strategy and tactics approach
