Lord Corporation

Lord Corporation develops and manufactures vibration and noise control systems for the industrial and aerospace markets. It is a privately held company with annual sales greater than US$400 million.

There are two divisions: the Mechanical Products Division, which includes Information Services (the group to be discussed here), and the Manufacturing Division.

The Information Services (IS) department provides support to internal clients. The group had always taken pride in providing good customer support. Middle management and those below knew they could count on IS and were very satisfied customers.

However, IS had poor performance on projects and could not support all division project requirements, leaving senior management very unhappy. In the five years prior to the TOC implementation every IS project was late. Even worse, the department only accepted 50% of the projects presented to it. Whenever possible the IS team avoided giving estimated completion dates. When dates were required, no one believed they would be met. It became obvious that change was necessary.

In February 1998, Lord's CIO, IS management, and the IS team attended a 2-Day TOC Project Management Workshop. When this workshop was finished, the IS team continued to work together to create a detailed implementation plan. They developed Critical Chain schedules for the nine projects the department was already committed to. Buy-in sessions were held for others in the organization who interacted with IS on projects so that all were on the same page.

While putting the implementation plan together, the IS team realized that its focus had been primarily on maintenance, on internal client service. The TOC Thinking Process tools brought to light that senior management, however, wanted IS to be a project management team. The department now successfully handles both.

For Lord Corporation, TOC meant changes in behavior and changes in methodology. Because senior management wanted IS to focus more on the projects, the IS team has had to empower its internal clients in areas of service and maintenance. IS has taught these internal clients to deal with many of their issues themselves, thus freeing up the majority of their time to work on projects.

Prior to TOC, IS operated in the "shotgun approach" - do a little on every project to keep everyone happy. Now, by focusing on the project(s) at hand, they can, with confidence, ignore the projects that are not currently scheduled because a start date and end date has already been established for them.

As much time as is necessary is now spent on defining and agreeing upon project scope. All parties associated with the project are involved in this process. Weekly meetings are held to update the network of the project status. TOC causes the team to "panic early" because the buffer status will tell the network if the project is heading for trouble before it is actually in trouble. This has enabled the project teams to communicate upstream while there is still time to take action - and to avoid falling behind.

Results

• The first project was started in March 1998 and completed in April 1998 - two weeks early
• At the time of this report (November 1998), eight projects had been completed using Critical Chain. Two came in early, five on-time, and one late (due to multi-tasking the Drum Resource - considered by Lord as a lesson learned)
• IS now advertises - with confidence and credibility - exact completion dates, not approximate quarter estimates
• Capacity has increased by 60%
• Cycle time has improved by 100%
• IS is taking on additional projects
• IS has not needed additional resources - operating costs have remained the same!
• Job satisfaction is up and stress levels are down

A continuing conflict for IS is that project and non-project tasks compete for the same scarce resources.

The future of TOC in Lord Corporation includes implementation in other parts of the organization, as well as plans to introduce TOC to its external resources.

A representative from Lord Corporation presented the company's story at the Jonah Upgrade Workshop in November 1998.