Philip Marris is a Paris-based TOC consultant who has over 30 years of experience implementing Theory of Constraints in more than 250 organizations worldwide. He founded Marris Consulting in 2005 and, crucially, began his TOC journey in 1986 when he joined Creative Output -- eliyahu-goldratt's original scheduling software company. This makes Marris one of the few practitioners who worked directly with Goldratt during the foundational period of TOC.
Connection to Ching
Ching visited Marris Consulting in Paris in spring 2015, shortly after the publication of rolling-rocks-downhill. The visit produced several recorded conversations:
Marris also hosted Ching for a webinar in September 2020 titled "Agile: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly," where Ching taught how to use TOC to identify what is slowing agile teams down.
Significance in the TOC network
The Ching-Marris collaboration is notable because it connects two distinct branches of the Goldratt inheritance: Marris represents the manufacturing/production side (the original TOC domain), while Ching represents the software/knowledge-work adaptation. Their recorded conversations explicitly address this gap -- what changes when TOC moves from factory to codebase? -- making the Marris Consulting content some of the most revealing material on Ching's translation methodology.
Marris's direct link to Goldratt via Creative Output also gives him a different vantage on the TOC tradition than Ching's book-mediated encounter. Where Ching discovered Goldratt through reading, Marris learned TOC by doing it alongside its creator.