Three friends met at their favourite café on a breezy Saturday morning – a ritual they’d preserved across the years, through shifting seasons and evolving careers, as a way to pause, reflect and speak freely without the pressure of being “on the clock.”
Aditya Gupta, who ran a growing distribution business of automobile-grade fasteners – nuts, bolts, washers and more – took a long sip of his filter coffee and sighed.
“I never know what’s in stock until we run out of it,” he confessed. “We’re juggling Excel sheets across different teams, but there’s no centralised system. Half the time we end up with too much of something we don’t need, and too little of what’s suddenly in demand. It’s like driving blindfolded and hoping not to crash.”
Krishnan S., seated across from him, nodded with a kind of weary solidarity. As a manufacturer of men’s formal shirts for leading retail brands, his world was filled with fabric swatches, trims and timelines.
“In our case, the problem starts right at the input stage,” he added. “Fabrics, buttons, labels, packaging material – everything’s tracked manually and stored in bits and pieces. And then there’s wastage – cutting losses, damage, returns. By the time the shirt reaches the store shelf, we’ve lost visibility of how efficiently – or inefficiently – we got there.”
Ismail Bohra, who ran a thriving office furniture rental business, chuckled as he stirred his tea.
“You guys at least have your stock in warehouses or factory godowns. I’ve got desks and chairs scattered across seventy-something client offices. When a rental contract ends, getting everything back without missing a piece is like a scavenger hunt. And we don’t even know what’s due for return unless someone remembers to check.”
Their conversation might have continued in a circle of shared frustrations, if not for the quiet interjection of their fourth friend – Rajyaveer Joshi. A supply chain specialist by profession and a patient observer by temperament, Rajyaveer had been listening quietly, almost meditatively.
“What you guys are facing isn’t unusual,” he said, leaning forward. “But it’s definitely solvable. You’re all trying to manage flow, but without identifying the constraint.”
“The what?” asked Aditya.
“The constraint,” Rajyaveer repeated, gently. “Every system has a bottleneck – a limiting factor that governs how much can move through it. That’s the essence of the Theory of Constraints, made popular by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. If you can identify that one weakest link in your operational chain and systematically address it, everything downstream starts to improve.”
He turned to Aditya first.
“For you, the constraint is 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲. Without a unified source of truth, you’re always in reactive mode – scrambling to fix what’s already broken. You don’t need to overhaul the whole system at once. Just start with a cloud-based inventory tracker that syncs in real time across your warehouse and sales teams. It’s not about tech for tech’s sake – it’s about reclaiming control.”
Then to Krishnan.
“Your constraint is 𝐟𝐥𝐨𝐰. You’ve got raw materials entering, finished goods exiting and losses getting buried in between. Map every stage, from input to output. Introduce checkpoints – not to add bureaucracy, but to reduce ambiguity. When flow is visible, leakages become obvious. You’ll start spotting patterns that were invisible in the chaos.”
And finally to Ismail.
“You’re not dealing with a warehouse. You’re managing 𝐠𝐞𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲. Your constraint is 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠. Tag every asset – QR codes, RFID, whatever suits your scale – and build a deployment log that updates in real time. Not just where things are today, but when they’re due for return or replacement. Once that data is centralised, retrieval won’t feel like a recovery mission.”
The table fell quiet – not in confusion, but in thought. There was a strange relief in knowing that the complexity they were drowning in could actually be mapped, understood and addressed – one constraint at a time.
“You made that sound… oddly simple,” said Aditya, half-grinning.
“It is,” Rajyaveer smiled, “once you know where to look.”