The Goal

I found this book to be comical because of the plot was so implausible and silly in many ways. The author portrayed Alex Rogo the main character to figure out problems that are rampant in his production plant with the help of an Ð'ÐŽÐ'oall-knowing,Ð'ÐŽÐ'± almost god like figure, Jonah, and being enlightened in an event in which many people would never think about, such as figuring out the Ð'ÐŽÐ'obottleneckÐ'ÐŽÐ'± by linking the problem of production plant to the problems that his boy scouts had in hiking. Also, the marital problems that Alex had in the book seemed like a very futile attempt in giving the plot more of a human-ish factor in the midst of manufacturing jargons and theories. For the sake of saving space for this book report, I will forgo all irrelevant plots (AlexÐ'ÐŽÐ'Їs personal life) and discuss only the key issues. However, I do give credit to the author because he ultimately wanted to prove a point in which I believe was very succinct and valuable for any businesses.

The book introduces various characters as UniCo employees in a mission to save their production plant from closing. Alex as the plant manager was given an ultimatum from his boss, Ð'ÐŽÐ'®turn the plant around in less than 3 months or face resignation.Ð'ÐŽÐ'Ї Alex and his teams were stumped in finding root cause of the problem until he coincidentally found Jonah, his old colleague. Through the guidance of his old friend, Alex was able to know the objective of his plant. It took him two days to find out that the ultimately goal of his plant was to make money. Although Ð'ÐŽÐ'omaking moneyÐ'ÐŽÐ'± seems very obvious for any business, it was fundamentally different from their previous Ð'ÐŽÐ'ogoalÐ'ÐŽÐ'± which was maximizing efficiency. It was the fact that they were so focused on efficiency that their plant was losing money.

With the guidance of Jonah, Alex and his team was able to find three criteria in which the plant can generate revenue. The three criteria were throughput, inventory and operating expense. Throughput can be defined as, the rate in which the plant generates money via sales. Inventory can be defined as, the money in which the plant has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. Operational expense can be defined as, the money that the plant spends in order to turn inventory into sale. Therefore the key element in generating money in the grand scheme of things would be to maximize throughput while reducing inventory and operational expenses.

Before, explaining in detail and knowing the problems, I believe it is essential for any plant to know what the problems are in the first place. Also, having everyone know about the problem is important as well so as to minimize any misunderstanding and creating an environment to work together as a team in solving the problem as efficiently as possible. In the case with Alex Rogo, he had good subordinates in coordinating the procedures in nullifying the problems, Lou, Stacey, Bob and Ralph played an essential role in making the plant profitable once again.

One of the first problems that Alex and his crew gave attention to was the bottleneck. As the name suggest, bottleneck is defined by an area where the output is the slowest, therefore causing up delays. The book further defined the consequence of bottlenecks; one hour lost in a bottleneck is one hour lost in the entire plant. The two bottlenecks in the plant were NCX-10 and the Ð'ÐŽÐ'oheating oven.Ð'ÐŽÐ'± In order to mitigate the problem, they reworked the schedule of the employees so that there will be no idling time of the machines, and prioritized the work in process. They have further added complementary machines (Zmegma) that aided the NCX-10 in reducing the work load. Last but not least in order to reduce the load to the bottleneck even further, they made changes to quality inspection protocol. Instead of inspecting the products after the bottleneck, inspecting it before gave them the ability to reduce the materials going into the bottleneck. Through these various processes, they were able to increase throughput and decrease inventory as well as the operating expense. Just by addressing the bottleneck the plant saw immediate results. Also, one of the key lessons learned was that idling of employee is necessarily not a bad thing (dedicating a crew to the bottleneck to minimize the idling time of the machines).