E Goldratt - The Goal

The first place I check is the NCX-10. But when I get to the machine, there's nobody to ask. Being an automated machine, it runs a lot of the time with nobody tending it. The problem is that when I walk up, the damn thing is just sitting there. It isn't run- ning and nobody is doing a set-up. I get mad.

I go find Mario.

"Why the hell isn't that machine working?" I ask him.

He checks with the foreman. Finally he walks back to me.

"We don't have the materials," he says.

"What do you mean, you don't have materials," I shout. "What do you call these stacks of steel everywhere?"

"But you told us to work according to what's on the list," says Mario.

"You mean you finished all the late parts?"

"No, they did the first two batches of parts," says Mario. "When they got to the third part on the list, they looked all around and couldn't find the materials for it in the queue. So we're shut down until they turn up."

I'm ready to strangle him.

"That's what you wanted us to do, right?" says Mario. "You wanted us to do only what was on the list and in the same order as listed, didn't you? Isn't that what you said?"

Finally I say, "Yes, that is what I said. But didn't it occur to you that if you couldn't do one item on the list you should go on to the next?"

Mario looks helpless.

"Well, where the hell are the materials you need?" I ask him.

"I have no idea," he says. "They could be any of half-a-dozen places. But I think Bob Donovan might have somebody looking for them already."

"Okay, look," I tell him. "You have the setup people get this machine ready for whatever is the next part on that list for which you do have the materials. And keep this hunk of junk running."

"Yes sir," says Mario.

Fuming mad, I start back to the office to have Donovan paged, so I can find out what went wrong. Halfway there, I pass some lathes and there he is, talking to Otto the foreman. I don't know how civil the tone is. Otto appears to be dismayed by Bob's presence. I stop and stand there waiting for Bob to finish and notice me. Which happens directly. Otto walks over and calls his machinists together. Bob comes over to me.

I say, "You know about what's going on-"

"Yes, I know," he says. "That's why I'm here."

"What's the problem?"

"Nothing, no problem," he says. "Just standard operating procedure."

It turns out, as Bob explains to me, that the parts they were waiting for at the NCX-10 have been sitting there for about a week. Otto has been running other batches of parts. He didn't know about the importance of the parts destined for the NCX-10. To him they looked like any other batch-and a rather unimpor- tant one judging from the size. When Bob got here, they were in the middle of a big, long run. Otto didn't want to stop... until Donovan explained it to him, that is.

"Dammit, Al, it's just like before," Bob says. "They get set up and they start running one thing, and then they have to break in the middle so we can finish something else. It's the same damn thing!"

"Now hold on," I say. "Let's think about this for a second." Bob shakes his head. "What is there to think about?" "Let's just try to reason this through," I say. "What was the problem?"

"The parts didn't arrive at the NCX-10, which meant the operators couldn't run the batch they were supposed to be run- ning," says Bob in kind of a sing-song way.

"And the cause was that the bottleneck parts were held up by this non-bottleneck machine running non-bottleneck parts," I say. "Now we've got to ask ourselves why that happened."

"The guy in charge here was just trying to stay busy, that's all," says Bob.

"Right. Because if he didn't stay busy, someone like you would come along and jump all over him," I say.

"Yeah, and if I didn't, then someone like you would jump all over me," says Bob.

"Okay, granted. But even though this guy was busy, he wasn't helping to move toward the goal," I say.

"Well..."

"He wasn't, Bob! Look," I say. I point to the parts destined for the NCX-10. "We need those parts now, not tomorrow. The non-bottleneck parts we may not need for weeks, or even months -maybe never. So by continuing to run the non-bottleneck parts, this guy was actually interfering with our ability to get an order out the door and make money."

"But he didn't know any better," says Bob.

"Exactly. He couldn't distinguish between an important batch of parts and an unimportant one," I say. "Why not?"

"Nobody told him."

"Until you came along," I say. "But you can't be everywhere, and this same kind of thing is going to happen again. So how do we communicate to everybody in the plant which parts are im- portant?"

"I guess we need some kind of system," says Bob.

"Fine. Let's go work on one right away so we don't have to keep putting up with this crap," I say. "And before we do any- thing else, let's make sure that people at both of the bottlenecks know to keep working on the order with the highest priority number on the list."

Bob has a final chat with Otto to make sure he knows what to do with the parts. Then the two of us head for the bottlenecks.

Finally we're walking back to the office. Glancing at Bob's face, I can tell he's still bothered by what happened.

"What's wrong? You look unconvinced about all this," I say.

"Al, what's going to happen if we repeatedly have people break up process runs to run parts for the bottlenecks?" he asks.

"We should be able to avoid idle time on the bottlenecks," I say.

"But what's going to happen to our costs on the other 98 percent of the work centers we got here?" he asks.

"Right now, don't worry about it. Let's just keep the bottle- necks busy," I say. "Look, I'm convinced you did the right thing back there. Aren't you?"

"Maybe I did the right thing," he says, "but I had to break all the rules to do it."

"Then the rules had to be broken," I say. "And maybe they weren't good rules to begin with. You know we've always had to break up process runs for expediency to get orders shipped. The difference between then and now is that now we know to do it ahead of time, before the external pressure comes. We've got to have faith in what we know."

Bob nods in agreement. But I know he'll only believe the proof. Maybe I'm the same, if I'm honest about it.

A few days pass while we develop a system to cure the prob- lem. But at eight o'clock on Friday morning, at the beginning of first shift, I'm in the cafeteria watching the employees wander in. With me is Bob Donovan.

After our earlier misunderstanding, I decided that the more people who know about the bottlenecks and how important they are, the better off we'll be. We're holding fifteen-minute meetings

with everyone working in the plant, both foremen and hourly people. This afternoon, we'll do the same thing with people working second shift, and I'll come in late tonight to talk to the third shift as well. When we've got everybody this morning, I get up in front of them and talk.

"All of you know that this plant has been in a downward slide for some time. What you don't know is that we're in the position to begin to change that," I tell them. "You're here in this meeting because we're introducing a new system today... a system which we think will make the plant more productive than it's been in the past. In the next few minutes, I'm going to explain briefly some of the background that made us develop this new system. And then Bob Donovan is going to tell you how it works."

Trying to keep meetings to fifteen minutes doesn't give us the time to tell them very much. But using the analogy of an hourglass, I do explain briefly about the bottlenecks and why we have to give priority to parts on the heat-treat and NCX-10 rout- ings. For the things I can't take time to tell them, there is going to be a newsletter, which will replace the old plant employee paper, and which will report developments and progress in the plant.