As Fast As Our Slowest Team Mate

The “Fat Herbie” story is a well known illustration used in the Theory of Constraints, developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It comes from his business novel The Goal and serves as a metaphor for identifying and managing bottlenecks in any process. The story uses a hiking trip with a group of scouts to explain how a single constraint can slow down an entire system. And it is very much applicable to how supply chains operate.

The Fat Herbie Story

On a hike, a troop of scouts moves along a trail. Most of the boys can walk at a decent pace, but one scout, Herbie, is overweight and slower than the rest. Because the troop must stay together, the entire group’s pace is limited by Herbie’s speed. No matter how fast the others walk, they can’t move faster than the slowest member without leaving him behind. Goldratt uses this story to demonstrate how bottlenecks constraints determine the overall throughput of a system.

Lessons from Fat Herbie

Identify the Constraint: Just as Herbie was the slowest hiker, every process has a limiting factor that dictates overall performance.

Elevate the Constraint: By lightening Herbie’s backpack, redistributing his load, and putting him at the front of the line, the group can move faster. Similarly, in business, resources and support should be allocated to strengthen the constraint.

Synchronize the System: The troop had to adjust their formation and pace to match Herbie’s. In operations, non bottleneck steps must align with the constraint to avoid overproduction and inefficiency.

Continuous Improvement: Once the main constraint is relieved, another will emerge. The process of improvement is ongoing.

Application in Business

The Fat Herbie analogy applies directly to manufacturing, project management, and service industries: In manufacturing, the slowest machine or process step determines total output. In project management, the longest or most resource constrained task limits project completion speed. In supply chains, the weakest supplier or slowest logistics step constrains the flow of the entire supply chain.

The Five Focusing Steps of TOC Goldratt formalized the approach into five steps:

• Identify the system’s constraint.

• Decide how to exploit the constraint.

• Subordinate everything else to the constraint.

• Elevate the constraint to increase its capacity.

• If the constraint is broken, return to step 1.

  
  

  In summary, the Fat Herbie story is a simple but powerful metaphor for the Theory of Constraints. It shows that the performance of any system is dictated by its slowest or weakest part, and that improvement requires focusing on that constraint rather than optimizing everything equally.