Five Focusing Steps

For finding and fixing the real constraint

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Every system has one thing limiting it. Improvements made anywhere else feel good, cost money, and change the output by nothing at all.

Steps two and three cost nothing and are where most of the gain sits. Step four is the one people jump to, and it is the only one that needs a cheque.

Identify the constraint

Find the one thing setting the pace of the whole system.

There is almost always exactly one. Look for where work piles up in front, and where things sit idle behind. Owners usually name the machine that breaks down most often, which is rarely it.

What is the one step that limits how much finished work leaves your business each week?

Exploit the constraint

Get everything you can out of it before spending a cent.

Stop the constraint being idle. No waiting on setup, no running the wrong job, no breaks that stop it, no rework arriving at it. This step is free and routinely finds twenty percent.

When is that step not running, and why? List every reason, however small.

Subordinate everything else to the constraint

The rest of the business serves the constraint.

Subordinate to the constraint, not narrowly to one way of exploiting it. There are usually several ways to exploit a constraint and several ways to subordinate to it, and tying every other area to one exploitation decision throws away options you will want. This is the step people hate, because it means other areas deliberately run below their capacity. Keeping a non-constraint busy only builds stock in front of the constraint. Local efficiency is what makes the whole system slower.

Which areas are measured on their own output in a way that hurts the constraint?

Elevate the constraint

Now spend money, if you still need to.

More hours, more people, another machine, outsourcing. It comes fourth on purpose. Plenty of businesses buy capacity at step four that step two would have given them free.

If steps two and three are genuinely exhausted, what would more capacity here cost?

Go back to step one

The constraint has moved. Do not let habit become the new one.

Once you break a constraint, something else is now the limit. The danger is that rules built around the old constraint stay in place long after it stopped being one. That inertia is the most common constraint in a mature business.

Which of our current rules exist only because of a constraint we already fixed?

Do you need a hand with this?

These are simple to draw and hard to fill in honestly. Most people get most of the way and then get stuck on the box, or the assumption, that actually matters.

Send it through and I will look at it properly. Doing this on factory floors since 2005, and 300 businesses later. You will get a straight answer about what I would do next, and whether that is something you need me for at all.

Your five focusing steps is sent with the message. No charge, no obligation.

Stuck on it?

These are simple to draw and hard to fill in honestly. If you want a second pair of eyes on yours, that is a thirty minute conversation and it costs nothing.

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