Managing Constraints

Constraints are bottlenecks, hindrances, stoppages or limitations to the success of something or somebody. Good plan should put necessary constraints into consideration and the reason why most plans fails is because constraints are not fully considered and seen as threats to plan. Constraints are better seen as challenges and not problems. The reason is because if constraints are seen as challenges, it could be better considered and means searched or looked for to alleviate the challenges. However, seen constraints as problem could make one abort one's plan instead of going on with the execution or probably spend lots of time(and waste resources alike) addressing the constraints instead of executing the plan.

Constraints are meant to be managed and not to be discarded. Reason is because there is no good plan without constraints which may be financial, human-wise, material, time or the likes. Wisdom demands that constraints should be consider at the beginning of the plan and not when the plan has already begun or launched.

In the manufacturing company, there are lots of constraints which are considered and lots of qualitative and quantitative techniques are used to solve or combine the constraints to give a better result. Constraints here could be labour, time/duration, material or machine. A typical example is, how many labour would be needed to produce 15,000 units of a product at the 'x level' of materials and 'y level' of machine at a given budgeted cost. In another way, if the firm has 15 labours and with cost to be incurred in the production being N20, 000, what will be the number of machines to be hired?

This explains what constraints is all about. Not all constraints could be know or visualize at the point of planning. Some constraints are hidden and will take extra analytical and conceptual skills to get them know; others easily surface and could be addressed almost immediately. In managing constraints, the following steps are inevitably important:

1. Identify the constraints by carefully looking at the present and into the future to ascertain what could hinder the success of what is being planned

2. Outline the constraints with level at which they could constitute threat to the plan e.g. at the beginning, middle or end

3. Analyse the extent of the constraints to know the extent of the threat and the class to which the constraint belong - financial, material, labour, etc.

4. Devise means of alleviating or addressing the threat or constraint and properly consider them while making a final draft of the plan

5. Execute the plan while taking the constraints into consideration

6. Evaluate the success of the plan (monitor and control)

Having this at mind, constraints are thus triggers to make planner think deeper and better for great result. While constraints could result in lower result, it shouldn't keep decision makers away from forging ahead in the plan.

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