ABSTRACT
Over the past century, there have been many attempts to improve the quality of both products and services throughout the world, and many different people have contributed to this improvement movement and the body of knowledge associated with it. In the early 1980s, Dr Eliyahu Goldratt introduced the world to a new way of looking at profitability through his now famous Theory of Constraints (TOC), which was presented in his and Jeff Cox's book The Goal. Like Lean, much has been written about Six Sigma methods and the now-famous acronym, DMAIC. The foundational concepts of TOC can be presented in a simple but understandable way as a reference environment. The Ultimate Improvement Cycle (UIC) effectively combines all three methodologies into a single improvement consortium, and it allows the people to use the best practices of each to solve most of the problems involved with implementing improvements.
