​Until his sudden passing in 2022, Arrie van Niekerk was the world’s foremost Theory of Constraints practitioner in mining. His unique contribution was to develop ways to improve both the physical Production Flow and the required People Behaviour to enable extraordinary operational improvements. Central to this was his unique way of setting  up a daily War Room meeting to manage the short-term direction of operations and drastically improve the focus and impact of decision-making. This method challenged regular cost and efficiency-based thinking and replaced it with Flow and Holistic thinking.
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The Stratflow Flow approach arose from this method.

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. His journey in TOC started in the 1990s when he turned around a Foundry critical to Iscor’s strategic success. Subsequently, he applied TOC to the Iscor Thabazimbi mine. This was the start of Arrie's Production Flow method.  

In 2015, Arrie was a keynote speaker at the TOCICO world conference. His talk, "A TOC Practitioner's Story of 15 Years of TOC Applications in the Mining Industry", 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. Different versions of this have been viewed more than 200,000 times.

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