Operations

A plumbing contractor called me out of the blue, stuck between not being able to hire and not being able to run the business he has. The constraint was not labor. It was the machine that was never built.

Twelve people walk into a working group carrying separate problems and walk out carrying a shared one. Episode 05 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.

Distorted cost accounting in public institutions does not just produce bad budget decisions. It produces learned helplessness in the people who manage those budgets. The system, not the people, is the cause.

King County faces a familiar cycle: deficits, targeted cuts, new taxes, repeat. A Theory of Constraints lens on their own public data suggests the measuring stick itself may be the problem.

A question for CFOs at Washington State critical access hospitals: could standard cost allocation be distorting your service line decisions at exactly the wrong time?

A practitioner reference for using the Theory of Constraints as strategic compass and Lean as tactical toolkit. Decision heuristics, integration sequence, and source literature.

A fine art printing company in Kent, WA was drowning in rework and backlog. The constraint was obvious once we looked: the graphic artist was doing every job twice. A pre-flight checklist and a simple scheduling change fixed it.

A hospital CFO runs the same numbers two ways and gets answers that disagree by a factor of five. Episode 04 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.

You built a practice around work you love. Now it is full, and somehow that is the problem. A guide for wellness practitioners who want their business to work better without losing what made it worth building.

You invested in a professional website. It gets traffic. It looks right. But the phone barely rings. The problem is not the website. It is what the website is saying.

Every business has one thing that limits how much it can get done. Find that one thing, fix it, and everything improves. Fix anything else, and nothing changes. A practical guide for small business owners.

Healthcare has adopted Lean almost exclusively for process improvement, but the Theory of Constraints answers the question Lean cannot: where should you focus? Using both together produces dramatically better results.

A concept for addressing the complex discharge problem at its source—by capturing discharge-relevant information during routine primary care, before any hospitalization occurs.