Keeping the Constraint Fed - July TOC Flow Insights

vinnymonteiro
Jul 1
2 min read

Updated: Jul 23

Another month, more momentum. We’re watching the concepts you learned turn into real throughput on shop floors and project sites across North America. Whether you’ve hit your first milestone or are still laying the groundwork, keep the stories coming—we love sharing your breakthroughs.

📣 Attendee Testimonial

Charter Steel is one of North America’s leading suppliers of carbon and alloy steel bar, rod, and wire. With integrated melt-shop and rolling-mill operations, they produce coil, rod, and cold-heading–quality steels and is recognized as the largest coil processor on the continent.

“We appreciate the few days we spent here in the TOC Flow Solutions training. Definitely good insights on better understanding flow, better understanding how to manage our buffers in our process, and how to look at it. Very actionable takeaways here from the way we schedule our plan and for the way we manage day-to-day and our processes. There are definitely good actions we can take based on this.

I highly recommend for professionals that are dealing with the day-to-day of operations, supply chain, even if you're managing a project, there are really good concepts here that can generate good actions.”

— Raphael Silveira, Senior Operational Excellence Leader

💡 Quick Insight – Step 3: Subordinate to the Constraint

Identifying and exploiting the constraint (Steps 1 & 2) only deliver if every other function serves that decision. “Subordinate” can sound harsh, but here’s what it looks like in practice:

Schedule to the constraint’s pace. If the bottleneck can finish 22 jobs/day, plan 22—not 30. Input into the system today only as much work as the constraint completed yesterday
Measure what helps flow. Trade local “efficiency” metrics for system-flow KPIs (buffer penetration, on-time-to-buffer)
Say “stop.” Upstream areas pause rather than overproduce. Downstream teams prep, kit, and test so the constraint never waits

Focus Test: If today’s action won’t raise throughput at the constraint, it can wait.

💡 Quick Tip – Guard the Constraint’s Calendar

Meetings stealing your constraint’s time? Declare a no-fly zone: two uninterruptible blocks per shift when the bottleneck resource works only on highest-priority orders—no status calls, no “quick favors,” no kidding. Teams are shocked at how much extra capacity appears.