<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none;" alt="" src="https://px.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=345371&amp;fmt=gif">
goal

It all started
with a book...

The year was 1991. Realization’s founder Sanjeev Gupta was a Manager, Supply-Demand Management System for Xerox at the company’s manufacturing headquarters in Webster, NY.

That was the year Sanjeev found his way to The Goal, written by Israeli physicist, Eliyahu Goldratt. This story (a business book written as a novel) follows the manager of a failing manufacturing plant who has three months to turn things around or the plant will close.

The ideas were radical and transformative, and The Goal became a global phenomenon, with over seven million copies sold.

Sanjeev would soon relocate from Webster to a Xerox plant in El Segundo, CA, a perennial bottleneck at Xerox. It was here that Sanjeev would take the best ideas from The Goal, the theory of constraints in particular, and patch together some software and just like a character in the novel, turn the Xerox plant around.

What he learned and applied then holds sway even today.

  • The purpose of scheduling is not to keep everyone 100% busy, but to maximize collective output. Get the products out the door.
  • Output is governed by the most constraining resource, so schedule everything around that.
  • Leave room in the schedules for Murphy’s Law. Not doing so causes unnecessary firefighting and wastage.

The formation of Realization Technologies was still well into the future. Sanjeev left Xerox in 1993 to form his own company, Thru-Put Technologies. Based on Goldratt’s ideas, Sanjeev Gupta and his co-founders, software architects Pratik Jain and Ravi Shankar, would launch a new application, Resonance. Goldratt’s ideas—and the theory of constraints—were headed to the enterprise software market.

02-2

It’s 1995,
in Phoenix,
Arizona…

Left: Eli Goldratt, Author of
The Goal and inventor of the Theory of Constraints.

Right: Dr. Goldratt at a dinner with Sanjeev and colleagues. Sanjeev and his team developed software to bring the power of Critical Chain scheduling to projects

The location is an industry conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Eliyahu Goldratt was coming, as was Sanjeev Gupta. By the time Dr. Goldratt arrived in Phoenix, he’d already learned that an American company, Thru-Put Technologies, had written a software product based on his theory of constraints. Fate stepped in and the two men met almost immediately on the bus from the airport. The conversation began and the Theory of Constraints met the theory of fortuitous meetings.

02-2

1997: Critical
Chain
, a novel.

In 1997, Eliyahu Goldratt wrote another business book as a novel, Critical Chain. He sent the galleys to Sanjeev and they discussed how to write a software application that could bring the ideas in the  book alive. After the book was published Dr. Goldratt soon had an Israeli aerospace defense company knocking on his door to streamline their projects. They needed software to implement the ideas in Critical Chain.

Dr. Goldratt called Sanjeev. Based on Critical Chain, a new project scheduling software that could  handle multiple projects was born. It was called Concerto.

1999: Realization Technologies,
Critical Chain & the Web

In 1999, Thru-Put was acquired. In its wake came Realization Technologies. Momentum gathered as  several important developments came together. Dr. Goldratt’s Critical Chain had provided a new way to plan and schedule projects. Web technology came into its own, making web-based software applications possible. Between Eli Goldratt’s algorithms, the web, and Sanjeev’s multi-project experience from Thru-Put, everything was about to change.

In 1999 Realization became the first company in the world to introduce multi- roject, web-based software to the world of projects. For the first time, an entire organization could work from a shared  schedule in real time.

The world
took notice

Realization was soon working with the US Navy, Medtronic, Seagate, Lucent Technologies, and the US Air Force, among other prestigious clients around the world who began to see significant savings in time and money. Which led to more clients and more projects.

Realization Technologies — along with its clients — has been recognized many times over for their work and won multiple awards. The Shingo Gold was awarded to Realization three times. The company won the US Air Force Chief of Staff Team Excellence Award. And the Franz Edelman Award in 2006. The US Patent Office has awarded Realization nearly a dozen patents.

the-shingo

The-franz

chief

uspto

03

2016: Lifetime
Achievement
Award

Realization
today

Realization now has customers in the US, Europe, India, South Africa and Australia. An effort to leverage AI in project planning and scheduling is in its nascent stage. The company is using AI to analyze data, but it’s not yet part of the software. AI isn’t possible in project management software without automated planning. The only product on the market that meets that criteria is the SMART Project Delivery System, developed by Realization Technologies. Stay tuned.