Theory of Constraints (TOC) says an organisation's output is limited by a single bottleneck at any given time. Improving anything else is wasted effort.
Improving the constraint improves the whole system — and that is where all the focus goes.
A repeatable loop for finding and exploiting your constraint — the engine of every TOC implementation.
Find the one resource, policy, or step that limits how much the whole system can produce.
Get everything possible out of it before spending a cent — cut downtime, changeovers, and idle minutes.
Align every other step to protect the constraint's output, even if it looks locally inefficient elsewhere.
If it's still the limiting factor, invest — more capacity, more people, better equipment.
Once resolved, a new constraint will appear somewhere else. Go back to step one — improvement is a process, not a project.
The rate at which the system generates money through sales — not just units produced.
A scheduling method that paces the whole line to the constraint's rhythm, with buffers to protect it.
TOC applied to project management — protecting the longest dependent chain of tasks, not each task's own deadline.
The two costs TOC works to shrink while throughput grows — less cash tied up, less spent to run the system.
Using buffer consumption as an early-warning signal, instead of managing every task individually.
Decisions evaluated by their effect on throughput first, not by traditional cost-per-unit thinking.
An Israeli physicist who turned his scientific method on management — and founded the Theory of Constraints. Author of The Goal, It's Not Luck, Critical Chain and The Choice; developer of the Five Focusing Steps, the Thinking Processes, Critical Chain Project Management and Throughput Accounting. His work is carried forward today by the TOC community he built — including Bureau Léonard, applying it in the field for 40 years.
TOC is not complicated mathematics — it is disciplined common sense, aimed at the one point where it pays off.
Local efficiency metrics create the very behaviour that chokes flow. Change the measurement, and the behaviour follows.
Don't fight uncertainty with precision — fight it with buffers, focus, and decisions that hold across the whole range.
We'll walk your process with you — and point to the constraint in the first session.
Book a working sessioninfo@leonard.eu.com · +32 3 448 06 15 · Kontich, Belgium