Almost the entire last week, I spent on reading up on Goldratt books which I read them a few years ago. I was sure that my understanding of the concepts would be much better this time. The books that I read were “ Critical Chain”, “ Its not Luck”, “Race”.

Each of them presents the fallacies in the current management techniques, be it production scheduling, decision making, Project management. When I read that the much cherished and holy concept of Net present value is fundamentally wrong because it does not take in to consideration that the availability of money is always a constraint, I was rather curious to read Throughput accounting , a book which talks about how we can account for in a much better way

Anyway, I summarize each of the book that I have read in a sentence or two

Critical Chain:
Early Starts and Late start which are normally found in project management are flawed concepts as Early starts for activities makes a project manager lose focus and Late creates resource contention and other problems. Hence one has to always identify critical path and then cut each of the activity time by 50% and then increase the project buffer. The reason for decreasing individual activities is that one tends to find that in any project there is unnecessary safety built in to it which isn’t necessary. On all the Non Critical Paths, add some feeding buffers (time) so that any delay on Non Critical Path will not affect CP. However, Critical Chain which is the concept proposed in the book comes in to picture when there is resource contention which happens most of the time. Then the book shows how to deal with such situations. Overall, a really good book for industries which deal with projects. In practice, the concepts of this book have been used in a wide range of industries. Intel uses Critical Chain concept to churn out chips at a faster rate than its competitors

Race:
If one has read “The Goal” by the same author, the book more or less is a workbook for the Goal. It reiterates the core concepts of TOC and visually explains the Drum Buffer Rope concept .

Its Not Luck:
This book is very fascinating read as it explains the Thinking tools in TOC using a business case. Alex Rogo , the protagonist in the novel is in charge of 3 companies which are a part of a diversified group called UniCo Inc. The way he turns around all the three companies using the thinking tools makes the book really worth reading. The techniques explained in the book are Evaporating Cloud Method, Current Reality Tree, Future Reality Tree, Transition Tree, Prerequisite tree. The author says that the above techniques are very powerful in a lot of situations. Of all the books, this is the one which I like the best.

After reading these books, I really feel management accounting has to be revamped to a great extent and the current measurements that are followed in companies are flawed to a large extent. Throughput, Operating Expense and Inventory should be brought in to the forefront for the measurement policies to become sane.