ReseaRch aRticle Open access Te Application of Teory of Constraints in Industry: A Case Study Chiranjib Bhowmik 1, * and Amitava Ray 2 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Silchar Assam 788010 India 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College West Bengal 735102 India Bhowmik and Ray, 2015. International J Ext Res. 2:21-29 http://www.journalijer.com Abstract Te aim of this paper is to implement TOC in forging area in which the constraints prevents the throughput of the system to enhance the quality and reduce errors. Many quality improvement (QI) approaches have a limited evaluation of the factors in the selection of QI projects. Teory of constraints (TOC) has been proposed as a remedy for the better selection of QI projects. Te strategic Tinking Processes (TP) of Teory of constraints is designed to struggle an enormous problem faced by organizations. Te paper proposes an improvement of TOC–based TP in one of the leading forging industry in India to identify and overcome the system constraints in the business. Te result shows that the TOC-TP identifes the production constraints and suggests measures to improve the system. Te research is applicable to any production house in which prod- uct quality reduces the throughput of the organization. Tis is the frst time that the theory of constraints philosophy has been used to maximize the production throughput in terms of quality. It makes a signifcant contribution to the production processes where anyone can measure the performance of the organization by selecting this approach. Keywords: Teory of constraints (TOC), statistical process control (SPC), process capability (Cp). *Corresponding author e-mail: chiranjibbhowmik18@gmail.com International JOuRnal Of extensive ReseaRch e-Print ISSN: 2394-0301 Introduction Theory of constraints is a system-level executive philosophy and described as the application of scientifc method to the challeng- es of managing complex organizations (Dettmer, 1998). TOC is the science of management. It applies the methods of physics to the general problem of managing in life (McMullen, 1998). TOC provides a way to simplify the complexity of human-based sys- tems and still keeps the main issue and impacts under managerial control (Schragenheim, 1998). One means of keeping everyone’s eye on the ball is TOC, a system-level management philosophy developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (Dettmer, 1998). One means of keeping everyone’s eye on the ball is TOC, a system-level man- agement philosophy developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (Dettmer, 1998). The core idea behind TOC is that every real system, such as a proft-making company, must have at least one constraint (Smith 2000). The constraints may be physical/tangible such as machines, vendors, etc. or non-physical/intangible, such as policies, perfor- mance measures, etc. The analytical approach with TOC comes from the conten- tion that any manageable system is limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints, and that there is always at least one constraint. Hence the TOC process seeks to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it, through the use of fve focusing steps. In this paper Theory of constraints is used to measure the throughput in terms of quality. Theory of constraints was initially applied to produc- tion scheduling and later to various areas such as operations, f- nance and measures. Quality improvement (QI) is a key principle of modern quality management approaches. Many QI approaches such as failure mode and effects analysis and statistical process control do not directly consider the impact of QI decisions on the proftability of the company. Quality managers typically con- sider quality measures such as scrap rates, customer complaints and returns, warranty claims, process mean and variance, but tend to ignore production variables such as product mixes, cycle times, Open Journal Page 1 of 9 Copyright © Bhowmik and Ray, 2015. Licensee IJER 2014. All rights reserved. Tis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unre- stricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.