Until his sudden passing in 2022, Arrie van Niekerk was a specialist facilitator on Theory of Constraints, specialising in the Mining Industry for 15 years. During this journey he developed ways to improve both the physical Production Flow and the required People Behavior to enable significant results.

His approach, which he called Production Flow, challenges regular cost and efficiency based thinking and replaces it with Flow and Holistic thinking.

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Arrie was recognised for a unique way to set up a daily War Room meeting to manage the short-term direction of operations and assists companies to structure a regular meetings framework that reduces the time spent in meetings as well as increasing its effectiveness.

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Arrie was a Senior Executive at Iscor Limited & Iscor Mining in various settings, including Operations Management, R&D, Welding Technology and Engineering application of metals.

He is a Metallurgical Engineer and was trained in TOC early in the 1990’s.

In 2015 Arrie was a keynote speaker at the TOCICO world conference. The link displayed here is a 5 minute summary of his talk “A TOC Practitioner’s Story of 15 Years of TOC Applications in the Mining Industry“ which was rated by many as one of the best presentations ever. He was also known for the three bottle experiment which demonstrates the flow aspects of the War Room in mining.