Articles

The product with the highest unit profit may not be the product with the highest profit per unit of resource consumed. The Theory of Constraints (TOC), with its emphasis on throughput costing, offers one possible approach to profitability analysis, but it is focused on the short term. The authors discuss why throughput costing, in combination with ABC, is a better option to guide long-term, strategic decision making.

Andy Mulholland and Mal Postings reveal the ideas and attitudes needed to navigate a rapidly changing business environment. They look at the problems faced by companies that are restrained by linear processes and argue that mobility must bring business and technology together in a collaborative approach. Building on examples from a wide range of industries, they show how, at this evolutionary phase of new-technology adoption, niche operations can have a stranglehold in key areas. They make a compelling case for embedding knowledge within the business process.

The City of New York is in the vanguard of developments in technology and mobility. The city must serve emergencies and daily operations equally well. Gino Menchini describes the numerous ways in which mobile solutions are helping the city in everything from first responses at a disaster site to health and building inspections, vehicle summonsing and ticketing, RFID tagging for routine task management. Wireless technology has also had a major impact on the working culture of many of the city’s employees.

The aim of the discipline of Operations Management is to gain competitive advantage. One more recent and lesser-known Operations Management technique that is finding greater acceptance is the Theory of Constraints (TOC). This paper illustrates the use of a specific TOC technique termed "The Thinking Processes" to solve an airline industry case toward improved competitive outcomes.

Schedule planning and control is a major task of construction project management. Traditional scheduling techniques, such as Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), have been widely applied for the past decades. However, schedule delays often occur in many construction projects. The Critical Chain Scheduling (CCS) method, derived from the Theory of Constraints (TOC) applied to project management domain and being popular in the industrial engineering domain, can make schedule planning and control more effective than traditional scheduling techniques.