VELOCITY was published in January 2010 by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. The book is a business novel about orchestrating three important improvement disciplines - the Theory of Constraints (TOC), Lean, and Six Sigma - to achieve far better bottom line performance than would otherwise be possilble.
Synopsis . . .
Amy Cieolara is made interim company president of a subsidiary recently purchased by a conglomerate and ordered to fix its problems, many of which were created by the short-sighted shenanigans of her predecessor. With good intentions, her corporate superiors insist that she use their Lean Six Sigma (LSS) program to accomplish this, and helpfully assign an in-house LSS master black belt to serve as her operations manager. But as time passes, it becomes painfully clear to Amy that LSS, for all its many operational improvements has in fact done nothing to improve what really matters most in the corporate world: bottom-line net income.
Meanwhile, fuming in the background is a veteran manufacturing manager who for years has been getting good results from the plant using a home-grown variety of the Theory of Constraints (TOC). The master black belt has run rough-shod over the TOC system in his zeal to create a perfect lean supply chain by way of a balanced line with leveled capacity. When it becomes clear to all that the balanced line isn’t working, Amy’s management team begins to look at the cause-and-effect logic of what has been going on. Through logic and new techniques, they begin to turn the corner back toward profitability. And, without giving too much away, what they find is that the three working in harmony are much stronger than they could be individually.