Pre-Conference

The following full-day Pre-Conference Workshops will be held on Monday, November 16. The cost to attend is US$495 per person. These sessions are open only to those attending the Velocity World^SM 2009 conference.

TOC Fundamentals
Host: Bob Jacob
Presenters: Dee Jacob, Dale Houle, Hugh Cole and Suzan Bergland

The amount of information available concerning the Theory of Constraints (TOC) is growing rapidly. It is increasingly difficult to sort through all this information and understand the basics. The leading Experts in each of the areas of TOC will provide the opportunity to understand each aspect of the fundamentals of TOC throughout this full-day session.

The day begins with an overview of TOC followed by presentations providing deeper insight into each aspect of TOC. These aspects include the Thinking Processes (the Jonah Program^®), Project Management, Supply Chain and Operations, and Strategy. The day will end with a wrap-up and final questions.

For those just beginning their exploration of TOC and for those seeking to understand the bigger picture and how it all fits together, this session will take you to the next step.

TOCLSS Fundamentals
Presenters: John Zahora, Bob Dooly and Bob Mendenhall

In difficult economic times, in fact in any economic time, the pressure to improve is intense. Executives and managers face many challenges: increase sales, reduce costs, avoid lay-offs, move inventory, accurately forecast future demand, rapidly find and develop the next market breakthrough and the greatest of all, SURVIVE! They’re asking, “What will help my company the most?...What do I do first?...Where can I have the greatest impact?”

Many organizations invested in gaining expertise in one of three separate pillars of improvement – TOC (Theory of Constraints), Lean or Six Sigma. In most cases, company experts spent significant time mastering one of these three and then devoted additional efforts trying to show return on the investment in their training. As other methodologies came along, shifting to using something else came across as another program of the month. But for many, when the objective for all three is to improve the organization’s results, why did it come down to an “either or” mentality? Why did some attempts at integrating the three not show the promised return or end up being integration in name only? Some of the reasons appear to be:

1. The methodologies were viewed as “tools in a tool box”, where each tool was perceived as best at particular uses.
2. Expertise in all methodologies was not available, making true integration impossible.
3. An effective integration process for the three methodologies was not developed.

Learn this process improvement breakthrough to integrate these improvement methodologies so your organization can utilize the strengths of all and rapidly improve its bottom line.