Letters.

TOC NOTHING NEW

The April article by Luke Cheng ("Line Balancing vs. TOC") made for interesting reading, and its message -- avoid suboptimization -- is certainly worthwhile. Unfortunately, it also illustrates that recent IE grads (and even many young IE faculty) have far too little grasp on the history of our field.

My concern is that Cheng attributes the development of the theory of constraints to Eilyahu Goldratt, who posed this idea in his wildly successful book, The Goal, about two decades ago. TOC says that one should focus on the factory bottleneck, an