Book Review by Komal Kishore

BOOK REVIEW

BY KOMAL KISHORE 

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox

OP 300: Operations Management | Fall 2015

Golden Gate University

536 Mission Street

San Francisco, CA 94105

www.ggu.edu

The Goal Book Report

           The Goal, written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, is a fictional novel in which the story is being used to demonstrate certain principles inherent in business management. The main character of the book is a 38-year-old man named Alex Rogo, who is himself employed in a management position. Alex works at a manufacturing company of an unknown product called UniCo Manufacturing. Specifically, he is the manager of their UniWare production plant located in a small town in rural Massachusetts.

At the beginning of the book, Alex has worked at UniCo Manufacturing for six months so far, and the company is very poorly organized and not very successful. Bill Peach, the CEO of the entire UniCo Manufacturing Company, eventually tells Alex that he has to turn around the operations of the company in order to make it more profitable. Bill Peach tells Alex that if he does not fix everything that has gone wrong in the next three months, he will close the plant, meaning that Alex and many other employees at the UniWare production plant will be out of a job.

The main problem that Alex has to fix is that there are orders to customers that are severely overdue and have not gone out yet, even though it has been almost two months since the orders were placed. Alex and the other employees at the UniWare plant go on to discover some of the underlying problems that are causing the delays in the orders going out, and to take steps necessary to change these faulty practices in order to ultimately turn around the productions of the plant and prevent it from closing. For example, one of the things that they discover during the course of the book is that some of their manufacturing technology in their “heat-treat” department is outdated, and it is therefore causing severe inefficiency in the production line, so as a solution they decide to immediately replace the equipment, and this in turn makes things run much more smoothly. Alex also implements further solutions to improve efficiency. The technological problem in manufacturing is an example of what is known as a bottleneck in the production process (Cox& Goldratt, 2004).