The Theory Of Constraints

Written by: Nabil KHIBIT

khibitn@gmail.com

Summary
1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
2 The Thinking Process Tools (TP tools) ............................................................................................. 1
2.1 Current Reality Tree ................................................................................................................ 2
2.2 Evaporating Cloud ................................................................................................................... 2
2.3 Future Reality Tree .................................................................................................................. 3

1 Introduction
The ongoing improvement is the most important strategic process that each enterprise is looking for.
But, how the top management can lead his enterprise to gain improvement? What are the necessary
tools for obtaining better results from activity? How to understand the core of the problem, define
the strategy and implement it?

All those questions can be answered by a methodology called “Theory of Constraints (TOC)”. TOC
was performed by Dr Goldratt in the 80’s, it was developed some years later, and by creating the
Goldratt Institute, the TOC was expanded all over the world.

Of course the TOC was declined to many specialties, we have now:

Critical Chain : For projects management.

Throughput accounting : For accounting with the concept of throughput.
Thinking Process : The most innovative tools in the domain of problems resolution.

This paper is dedicated to explain the principles of the “Thinking Process Tools” those are considered
like the most helpful tools to obtain concrete results for any complex situation.

2 The Thinking Process Tools (TP tools)

The TP tools are a package of tools that help users to formalize their ideas in a concise diagrams and
then leading them to give ad-hoc solutions and the way to implement them.

Those tools are:

Current Reality Tree.

Evaporating Cloud.
Future Reality Tree.
Prerequisite Tree.
Transition Tree.
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2.1 Current Reality Tree
The starting point in the constructing the tree is the identification of the Undesirable Effects
(UDE’s).A UDE is defined as something that exists in the reality; it’s negative and compromises the
organization for its continued existence.

The first step is identifying the UDE’s, regardless of the sources of the UDE’s, we must only focus on
the UDE’s as it defined.

For example, we imagine we are in a department of an establishment and we see some problems
caused by others in the organization, first of all, we must identify all UDE’s as entities of the model:

UDE01 There is many errors in our reports UDE03 The image of the department is bad

UDE02 The forwarded documents are UDE04 The meetings can’t begin at time
incomplete

An entity is defined as an element of a causality model, it represent an idea, positive or negative and
must be written in the present tense.

After that we must link the entities of the system and add more entities as the process of
constructing the CRT.

UDE03 The image of the department is bad

UDE01 There is many UDE04 The meetings UDE02 The forwarded

errors in our reports can’t begin at time documents are incomplete

UDE05 The collaborators are Ent01 The operated Ent02 The responsibility is
not rigorous in the execution control is not regular diffused among
of their tasks collaborators

The ellipse that joins links must be understood like an “and”, in this example we must have in the
same time Ent01 and UDE05 for having UDE01.

2.2 Evaporating Cloud (EC)

This tree helps user to see clearly the conflict and guides him to surfacing the underlying reasons that
keeps the conflict in place. After that he can find the solutions (called in the TOC jargon, the
injections) to bring to the system for solving the core conflict.

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Example:

For the UDE identified in the first section as UDE01 we can define the equivalent tree as follow:

UDE01 There is many errors in our reports

The reports produced The production of

are exact reports takes a long time

Purpose: High
performance of
the organization

The top management The production of

receives reports earlier reports takes little time

This tree shows the conflict hidden behind the problem (or the UDE) of commit many errors in the
produced reports.

2.3 Future Reality Tree (FRT)

Constructing the FRT represents the implementation for the problems solutions of any identified UDE
in the CRT. The solutions are formalized as injections. We can define the injections as entities that if
they are added in the right places to the CRT in combination with other entities they can remove the
UDE via the deletion of the core conflicts detected in the Evaporating Cloud. With the FRT, we can
check that what we want is exactly what we will get.

To understand the FRT, a simple point of view allows us considering it as a Current Reality Tree with
all UDE’s changed on a Desirable Effects (DE’s).