To this end, CII plans to enter into a formal association with the Avraham YGoldratt Institute (AGI) Academy and the Exim Bank.

The final modalities of the arrangement will be decided during EliGoldratt's two-day visit to India -- on the first day, November 18, he isscheduled to address delegates at the CII Quality Summit '99, and onNovember 19, meet key political, Government, and business opinion-makers.There are indications that the Exim Bank may come forth with a Rs 2 crorecorpus to bankroll the new venture. In addition, the Exim Bank may alsooffer Rs 1 crore to finance the initial training needs.

Says N Ramanathan, chairman, TQM technical committee, CII: ``The CII's jobis to consolidate like-minded technologies of management. The `Theory ofConstraints' we feel will work strongly with the existing methodologies ofTQM and TPM.'' Confirms Kathryn A Leishman, director, AGI, Australia: ``Yes,the CII and the academy definitely hope to work out an arrangement during DrGoldratt's visit.''

If the alliance goes ahead as planned, as a first step, a cluster of 10companies will be initiated into the Theory of Constraints to create Indiansuccess stories in the next twelve months. In the first year too, 100 othercompanies (impacting 2,500 persons) are to be covered by the theory,followed by 350 companies in the second year and 850 companies in the thirdyear.

By working with more than 1,000 companies over the next three years theGoldratt vision is to push India's GDP up by 1 per cent through a qualitymovement.

The rollout of the `Theory of Constraints' will start with an awarenesscreation exercise-where three or four programmes a month will be run acrossmetros every month. While the awareness programme will be by invitation-onlyCEOs, welcome!-interested companies can then sign up for the paid programmeof eight weeks which will cover eight management video modules called theGoldratt Satellite Programmes. These cover: Operations, finance andmeasurements; product development and engineering; distribution; marketing;sales and achieving buy-in; managing people; and strategy and tactics.

The eight-week learning curve which helps identify ``what is required'' willthen be followed by a `4X4' brainstorming session-four days to view anddiscuss the videotapes with reference to each company, and four days todesign and develop the enterprise-wide strategy based on the `Theory ofConstraints'. The focus here is on finding `the' constraint choking acompany's `throughput' (read: sales) with three questions: What to change;what to change to; and how to cause change?

Eli Goldratt set up the AGI Academy-named after his father-in 1986. Theworldwide headquarters are based at New Haven, Conn., USA, with partneroffices in countries like the US, UK, Spain, Netherlands, Israel, SouthAfrica, Brazil, Australia.

The academy also has representative offices in Mexico, Hongkong andSingapore. Currently, the Academy is headed by Dale Houle and managed by 12partners across the globe.

Eli Goldratt has retired from the day-to-day functioning of the institute,but remains closely involved with the AGI Academy as founder,shareholder-and well-wisher.