A FRUITFUL AND INSIGHTFUL TOC PROGRAMME!

We manufacture handbags and mobile pouches,wallets, belts…we design and manufacture many other fashion accessories like that.. And we have our own stores. We also supply to Large Format Stores.

One day I was just sitting with my consultant Ashwini Gulanikar and she was telling me about this programme, that she was going to attend the next day. I somehow managed to get enticed into it and I came for this programme, TOC (Theory of Constraints).

When I first came for this programme…and the first few sessions, I used to simply look at Lisa’s face, the lady conducting the programme and I used to think, how does she know all my problems… how does she know what exactly the issues are, in so much depth… and it was really like .. Oh! My God, someone knows all my problems…..

Anyways as we got along, I realized it is not just my problems, everyone is going through the same issues and then there are bigger companies, smaller companies, all of them having the same kind of day-to-day issues……. and we started looking at things very differently.

I obviously being the MD of the company took the major target of improving the PAT of the company. In that there are so many little-little things that I learnt.

One of that little thing that I learnt was “Agility”. I think what we had was a lot of buffers for everyone and KRAs were all set for every one’s comfort. Because you know when we set the KRA, we ask the person and they obviously put in all their buffers so that they manage…and as incentives and increments are all connected to KRA’s,….we never look at the connection of what is the competitive edge but we start with the comfort zone of what is possible and not think of how we can break it down further to achieve the almost impossible. And obviously, there is always a lease in our mind that the most impossible will take a lot of our monitoring and it will be constricted…

And we had like a 4 months’ time for production and 6 months’ time from design to production for the programme.

Which was a crazy amount of time which we all knew about. But there was nothing that we were tangibly doing.

But I think the energy of the class and seeing everybody doing it …

And you know I even took my production master who understands very little English, but I knew that I needed his support. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to manage this on my own. Because it is difficult to drill it down to the people who has been there with you especially for so many years…

The best part was, we were 6 of us, my core team for the programme, and therefore there was not much need to tell any other team members……because it will automatically permeate down the line….

So we looked a lot at Agility of giving the right product to the customer, since businesses have changed, over a period of time.

We looked at so many other things like….viewable reports which could be looked at … and comprehend….so down the line also the brief is very clear of what they are suppose to do for things that are going off..