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Writer's picture"The Grain Guru"

Digitally Breaking The Triangle of Constraints Rule

Updated: May 11, 2022


The concept of “you can’t get them all” is still a basic principle in project management, product development and other life experiences.
 


 

The idea of picking our priorities while understanding the expected results makes a lot of sense. The basic idea is that to complete a task there are trade-offs:


Shorter time + low cost = poor quality

Shorter time + high quality = higher cost

High quality + low cost = longer time


Recently, I had a fascinating meeting with an early adopter customer who is facts and data driven and runs an excellent operation. Towards the end of the meeting we talked about the grain market transition to digital inspection. The discussion centered around replacing a tedious human task with a method which is 20X faster, 40X more accurate and can provide cost savings in labor, operations and quality. However, despite these improvement opportunities, there remains a challenge for decision makers in the industry across the private sector, government and academia to move to such improved methods.


We were considering any potential downside in moving to digital inspection to explain this reluctance when suddenly my customer stood up and took few big steps to the whiteboard. He drew a triangle and added three words, one in each corner: cost; time and quality. He then wrote “Digitally Breaking The Triangle Of Constraints Rule”.


Next, he drew a comparison table and at the top the word “Facts” in bold letters.


Facts

Time: 1 minute versus 20 minutes

Accuracy (quality): 0.5% versus 20%

Operation Cost: 1% mistakes in grading, milling & packing ~$1.5M/year

As always he finished his enthusiastic performance with “Am I missing something here???”



Ron Hadar

Vibe Imaging Analytics

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