|
Theory Of Constraints
The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger than its weakest link". That means that organizations and processes are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them, or at least adversely affect the outcome. History The theory of constraints is an overall management philosophy, introduced by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his 1984 book titled '' The Goal'', that is geared to help organizations continually achieve their goals. Goldratt adapted the concept to project management with his book ''Critical Chain'', published in 1997. An earlier propagator of a similar concept was Wolfgang Mewes in Germany with publications ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Management Paradigm
Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a government bodies through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations. Larger organizations generally have three hierarchical levels of managers, organized in a pyramid structure: * Senior management roles include the board of directors and a chief executive officer (CEO) or a president of an organization. They set the strategic goals and policy of the organization and make decisions on how the overall organization will operate. Senior managers are generally executive-level professionals who provide direction to middle management. Compare governance. * Middle management roles include branch managers, regional managers, department managers, and section managers. They provide direction to front-l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Throughput Accounting
Throughput accounting (TA) is a principle-based and simplified management accounting approach that provides managers with decision support information for enterprise profitability improvement. This approach identifies the factors which limit an organization's ability to reach its goals, and then focuses on simple measures that drive behavior in key areas aimed at reaching those goals. TA was proposed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt as an alternative to traditional cost accounting. It differs from costing, in it is cash focused and does not allocate all costs (variable and fixed expenses, including overheads) to products and services sold or provided by an enterprise, and it does not replace the need to prepare formal company accounts, although promoters of TA note that management decisions are not generally based on formal company accounts anyway. Only costs that vary totally with units of output (see the definition of TVC below) e.g. raw materials, are allocated to products and services ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supply Chain
A supply chain is a complex logistics system that consists of facilities that convert raw materials into finished products and distribute them to end consumers or end customers, while supply chain management deals with the flow of goods in distribution channels within the supply chain in the most efficient manner. In sophisticated supply chain systems, used products may re-enter the supply chain at any point where residual value is recyclable. Supply chains link value chains. Suppliers in a supply chain are often ranked by "tier", with first-tier suppliers supplying directly to the client, second-tier suppliers supplying to the first tier, and so on. The phrase "supply chain" may have been first published in a 1905 article in ''The Independent (New York City), The Independent'' which briefly mentions the difficulty of "keeping a supply chain with India unbroken" during the British expedition to Tibet. Overview A typical supply chain can be divided into two stages namely, produ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project Management
Project management is the process of supervising the work of a Project team, team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project initiation documentation, project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are Scope (project management), scope, time and budget. The secondary challenge is to operations research, optimize the Resource allocation, allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet predefined objectives. The objective of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the client's objectives. In many cases, the objective of project management is also to shape or reform the client's brief to feasibly address the client's objectives. Once the client's objectives are established, they should influence all decisions made by other people involved in the project– for example, project managers, designers, contractors and subcontractors ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of the secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products (such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles), or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers (usually through wholesalers, who in turn sell to retailers, who then sell them to individual customers). Manufacturing engineering is the field of engineering that designs and optimizes the manufacturing process, or the steps through which raw materials are transformed i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kanban
Kanban ( meaning signboard) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing (also called just-in-time manufacturing, abbreviated JIT). Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency. The system takes its name from the cards that track production within a factory. Kanban is also known as the ''Toyota nameplate system'' in the automotive industry. A goal of the kanban system is to limit the buildup of excess inventory at any point in production. Limits on the number of items waiting at supply points are established and then reduced as inefficiencies are identified and removed. Whenever a limit is exceeded, this points to an inefficiency that should be addressed. In kanban, problem areas are highlighted by measuring lead time and cycle time of the full process and process steps. One of the main benefits of kanban is to establish an upper limit to work in process (commonly referred as "WIP") inventory to avoid overcapacity. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murphy's Law
Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." Though similar statements and concepts have been made over the course of history, the law itself was coined by, and named after, American aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr.; its exact origins are debated, but it is generally agreed it originated from Murphy and his team following a mishap during rocket sled tests some time between 1948 and 1949, and was finalized and first popularized by testing project head John Stapp during a later press conference. Murphy's original quote was the precautionary design advice that "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way." The law entered wider public knowledge in the late 1970s with the publication of Arthur Bloch's 1977 book ''Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG'', which included other variations and Corollary, corollaries of the law. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Limiting Factor
A limiting factor is a variable of a system that causes a noticeable change in output or another measure of a type of system. The limiting factor is in a pyramid shape of organisms going up from the producers to consumers and so on. A factor not limiting over a certain domain of starting conditions may yet be limiting over another domain of starting conditions, including that of the factor. Overview The identification of a factor as limiting is possible only in distinction to one or more other factors that are non-limiting. Disciplines differ in their use of the term as to whether they allow the simultaneous existence of more than one limiting factor (which may then be called "co-limiting"), but they all require the existence of at least one non-limiting factor when the terms are used. There are several different possible scenarios of limitation when more than one factor is present. The first scenario, called ''single limitation'' occurs when only one factor, the one with maximu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optimization (mathematics)
Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criteria, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfields: discrete optimization and continuous optimization. Optimization problems arise in all quantitative disciplines from computer science and engineering to operations research and economics, and the development of solution methods has been of interest in mathematics for centuries. In the more general approach, an optimization problem consists of maxima and minima, maximizing or minimizing a Function of a real variable, real function by systematically choosing Argument of a function, input values from within an allowed set and computing the Value (mathematics), value of the function. The generalization of optimization theory and techniques to other formulations constitutes a large area of applied mathematics. Optimization problems Opti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constraint (mathematics)
In mathematics, a constraint is a condition of an optimization problem that the solution must satisfy. There are several types of constraints—primarily equality constraints, inequality constraints, and integer constraints. The set of candidate solutions that satisfy all constraints is called the feasible set. Example The following is a simple optimization problem: :\min f(\mathbf x) = x_1^2+x_2^4 subject to :x_1 \ge 1 and :x_2 = 1, where \mathbf x denotes the vector (''x''1, ''x''2). In this example, the first line defines the function to be minimized (called the objective function, loss function, or cost function). The second and third lines define two constraints, the first of which is an inequality constraint and the second of which is an equality constraint. These two constraints are hard constraints, meaning that it is required that they be satisfied; they define the feasible set of candidate solutions. Without the constraints, the solution would be (0,0), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mental Model
A mental model is an internal representation of external reality: that is, a way of representing reality within one's mind. Such models are hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. The term for this concept was coined in 1943 by Kenneth Craik, who suggested that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can help shape behaviour, including approaches to solving problems and performing tasks. In psychology, the term ''mental models'' is sometimes used to refer to mental representations or mental simulation generally. The concepts of schema and conceptual models are cognitively adjacent. Elsewhere, it is used to refer to the "mental model" theory of reasoning developed by Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M. J. Byrne. History The term ''mental model'' is believed to have originated with Kenneth Craik in his 1943 book ''The Nature of Explanation''. Georges-Henri Luquet in ''Le dessin enfant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Skill
A skill is the learned or innate ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. Some examples of general skills include time management, teamwork and leadership, and self-motivation. In contrast, domain-specific skills would be used only for a certain job, e.g. operating a sand blaster. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used. A skill may be called an art when it represents a body of knowledge or branch of learning, as in ''the art of medicine'' or ''the art of war''. Although the arts are also skills, there are many skills that form an art but have no connection to the fine arts. People need a broad range of skills to contribute to the modern economy. A joint ASTD and U.S. Department of Labor study showed that through technology, the workplace is chang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
