This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"If you truly want to compare two different management approaches, don't focus on their techniques and tools. If we'd done so here, we'd have seen two seemingly very different processes. After all, drum-buffer-rope (DBR), the TOC planning methodology, doesn't seem to have much in common with kanban cards. In fact, in some respects the tools of DBR might seem to have more in common with advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems than with JIT or lean production. But this isn't the case. The TOC paradigm is much closer to JIT than it is to APS. The search for simple, effective rules is common to both TOC and JIT, but it's alien to APS. This kind of insight isn't clearly visible if we look closely only at detailed techniques.
"The similarities between JIT and TOC are many. The areas of difference are few. Key differences lie primarily in considerations that TOC addresses and JIT does not. The underlying reason for these differences is that by its very nature, TOC takes a broader view of systems management than does JIT."
Of course, Bill and Eli are talking about the underlying goals and philosophies of these two approaches to management. The other blog entry in this post talks about the relative performance value of going down one route versus the other.
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