Critical Chain 2023 - TOCICO conference on Critical Chain

Frédéric Grehal, Circor Implementing Critical Chain to accelerate new products development

Circor Aerospace & Defense’s on-time finish performance of new product development projects was not at the expected level. They suffered from projects finishing late, problems with specifications, silo phenomenon, and they were limited in their capacity to run projects in parallel by a capacity constraint in the Qualification Laboratory.

They decided to implement Critical Chain Project Management. They began with 3 pilot projects. During this pilot phase they increased the capacity of the bottleneck department. Associated project plannings have been reviewed and adjusted to be CCPM-compliant: the sequence of activities became more logical with realistic leadtimes and several optimisation measures to achieve the projects faster were identified and implemented.

They also changed and enhanced their management routines to facilitate the coordination & synchronisation between key actors. They introduced “Mascots” (remarkable objects that physically follow the Critical Chain during execution). This increased the coordination and enabled the work to be carried out in a more focused way.

The project durations were reduced, and the projects finished on time. The efficiency and throughput of the New Product Development also increased. Following the success of the pilot projects, they then rolled out the Critical Chain Way on their entire portfolio.

All these actions resulted in better managerial alignment, improved communication and better problem escalation within the project teams. It also provided Circor Aerospace & Defense with better, more challenging and more realistic, project schedules, and gave them much better visibility on the project’s progress.

Etienne Lecerf, Marris Consulting : Engineering To Order boosté par l'approche Chaîne Critique

Engineering To Order (ETO) companies design and manufacture customized products on demand; the process uses customer requirements to define, engineer, and validate a new design that will satisfy those requirements. In this type of business the lead times for customers is much longer than for standard products made to stock.

These long lead times are usually a problem for clients and there is always a lot of pressure to reduce them. Offering short lead times is a competitive advantage, and we will show how doing business the Critical Chain Way enables impressive increases in speed.

We will also show, based on many examples, the other significant positive impacts: big increases in productivity by identifying and better using the bottleneck resources, much better visibility throughout the organization by using the emblematic Fever Chart, better quality of life for the actors, and greatly improved honoring of the promised end dates.

We will also discuss the main problems faced by these organizations, how intricate they are, and how to solve them.