Abstract
M.Tech. (Operations Management)
South Africa currently has one of Africa’s largest economies. An enormous portion of this country’s economy is dependent on the natural land resources. Mining has and continues to be the pride of this nation setting them high up on the map and sustaining the economy, at some point controlling 37% of foreign investment. South Africa is one of the largest producers of platinum, gold, manganese, coal, zirconium, and a couple of other minerals. One of the world’s largest primary platinum producers is found in South Africa, named Lonmin. The dependence of the economy on minerals would put this organization together with others, under pressure to perform, and thus a great operations strategy is a good investment to this sector.
In 2013, Lonmin introduced a new operation system called the Theory of Constraints (TOC). The purpose of this shift was to adopt a strategy that would optimize efficiency in this organization and TOC presented benefits that seemed to match the goals of this organization.
TOC is a philosophy that is applied to debottleneck processes in order to ensure a more efficient flow, which aims to maximize the processing capacity. Lonmin’s 4B shaft and Saffy shaft were the two shafts used as a case study to determine if TOC is a practical strategy for optimization of organizational efficiency.
SPC charts of the shafts were used to study the production trends over a period of 5 years. Questionnaires were used to study the consistency of TOC and the challenges that have hindered its maximum efficiency, employee reception, and the overall sustainability of this system based on the data previously collected from the SPC and questionnaires. Although factors such as attitude, training and understanding played a major role in the objectives of this study, this study was done with the primary purpose of determining whether or not TOC is an effective system in this organization.
The results of the questionnaires were interpreted in frequency bar charts, custom tables, the independent t-test, reliability analysis and the exploratory factor analysis. The reliability analysis was used to validate the questions used to measure the attitude and perception of employees working in these shafts.
The production outcome of these results were contradictory and thus the profitability of TOC is not conclusive. The production output on its own could not be considered since the trends..