The Goal Assignment

THE GOAL ASSIGNMENT

PART I

a.     The Boy Scout hike is a great analogy to use when trying to understand the manufacturing environment. The idea of the hike was to get the whole group of boy scouts to the campground in a reasonable amount of time. Similar to a manufacturing environment, products and orders have be completed in an acceptable amount of time for happy customers. The adult supervision during the hike compares to plant management. During manufacturing, there is the possibilities of constraints, and when these arise it is the responsibility of the plant manager to overcome this obstacle in order to maintain a smooth running system. During the hike Alex discusses Herbie, the slowest scout in the troop. Later on in the book Alex goes on to comparing Herbie to the two bottleneck machines that were in his production process. Alex used his observations on the hike to help him resolve the issues with his two bottleneck machines. Strangely enough, Alex learned a lot of valuable information from the hike that he could directly apply in solving problems at his plant.

b.     Alex worked very hard to resolve the Herbie problem. After a couple miles of walking Alex discovered Herbie was the weakest link of the group, he was the bottleneck. Alex makes it clear that a job is not done until all factors are complete. Herbie determined the pace of the project because he was the slowest and the job wasn't finished until all the boys made it to the campsite. To resolve the Herbie problem Alex looked at the order of the hikers. He discovered that by putting the hikers from slowest to fastest improved the overall pace of the hike. Alex also realized that Herbie was carrying a large amount of camping supplies, too large for him to handle on his own. By lightning Herbie’s load and distributing it between the other hikers helped the group as a whole, resulting in all hikers moving faster.

PART II

1. Page 59-61: Alex calls Jonah to ask about how he can measure plant progress on a “floor level.” He tells him about how headquaters have their own way of measurement with net profit, return on investment, and cash flow, but it only applies to the overall organization and tells no further information on the individual plant progress. Jonah explains to Alex that the goal no matter what stays the same, but can be classified in different ways. He then goes on telling Alex he must classify the measurements so they relate to day-to-day operations. The measurements are as follows: throughput, inventory, and operational expense. Throughput meaning the money made through sales, inventory for all the money invested in purchasing with the intent to sell, and operational expense being all the money spent to turn inventory into throughput. Jonah goes into further detail to explain that higher throughput, lower inventories, and reduced operational expenses should become top areas of focus to improve plant profitability.
2. Page 138- 140, 152-159: Alex reaches out to Jonah when he has trouble balancing the floor and struggles with getting orders out on time. This is when Alex explains bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are “any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it” whereas non-bottlenecks are “any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed upon it.” Jonah explains the importance of finding your bottleneck in order to fix the balance. Alex and his team determine that two of the machines in their production are bottleneck and cause late orders. When Jonah visits he helps fix the bottleneck issues by explaining that bottlenecks should be working on daily demand instead of long-term capacity. This shows Alex and his team that bottlenecks don’t have to be a bad thing if approached the right way.
3. Page 229-234: When Alex hears about the possibility of the plant being shut down he turns to Jonah for advice. Jonah suggests cutting all bottleneck batch sizes in half. When Alex first tells the team they are hesitant, but they soon figure out that this cut will lead to half the work in process on the floor and only needing half the investment on work in process. This ultimately leads to faster turn around rates meaning more customers coming for faster deliveries, resulting in an overall sales increase. However, this does mean more setup time, but this can be justified when referring back to Jonah’s rule: “an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is an hour miraged with a bottleneck.” This means it’s okay to have more setup because it only cuts into the time the machines would be not active. They then go forward by telling marketing to advertise faster deliveries.
4. Page 28-33: Alex runs into Jonah at the airport and discuss Alex’s plant. Alex brags about how his productivity is up and expenses have gone down. He also admits how his robots are running around the clock and his plant struggles with meeting shipment dates. Oddly enough, Jonah already knew this without Alex even telling him. As they walk to Jonah’s gate, he tells Alex how his thinking of running an efficient plant is wrong. Jonah challenges Alex to discover what the true goal is of his plant is. In the end Alex discovers that making money is the appropriate goal and so, based on Jonah's definition of productivity, an action that moves the plant toward making money is productive. And an action that takes away from making money is non-productive.
5. Page 200-206 An instance when things backed fired for Alex and his team was when they realized materials that used to running smoothly through the plant were not getting to final production fast enough. Alex realized there was a problem when he discovers this, “With the bottlenecks more productive now, our throughput has gone up and our backlog is declining. But making the bottlenecks more productive has put more demand on the other work centers.” Other workstations around the plant were told to work on red parts that were headed to bottlenecks. The green parts that are needed for final production were not getting done because the bottleneck parts were taking up 75 or 80 percent of the workers time. Materials were getting stuck in front of the bottleneck and since some of the materials didn't have red tags they were not getting attention and not getting to final production like they normally used to. Therefore, causing a was large pile of inventory by NCX-10 and heat-treat. Alex and his team did not understand the relationship between bottlenecks and non bottlenecks very well. They also did not understand that “ A plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient.” Jonah explains that the non bottleneck machine “Y” are faster than bottleneck machines “X.” So in the end Jonah tells them the solution is to only work Y machines enough to keep the flow equal to plant demand. He basically tells the team it is ok to let non bottleneck machines sit idle sometimes. Stacy summarizes the solution very well here, “ In no case does Y ever determine the throughput for the system. Whenever it’s possible to activate Y above the level of X, doing so results in only excess inventory, not in greater throughput.” In conclusion, Alex and his team realized that working non bottlenecks faster than bottlenecks did not help the plant it only made more piles of inventory.
6. Page 127-134: Jonah teaches Alex that his plant has statistical fluctuations and dependent events. Later on Alex has a meeting with Lou and Bob to discuss how the robots are actually not as efficient as they thought. The plant struggles to get Hilton Smyth order out the door. Alex knows that in order to get the order on the truck by 5pm they should abandon the robots and do all the work by hand. However, to prove a point he lets Bob and Lou use the robots. In the end they do not get the order shipped on time because there was statistical fluctuations in the number of parts the humans produced and gave to the robot. The robot has a steady pace of 25 parts per hour, but since they humans did not produce at a steady pace of 25 per hour the order did not get complete on time.

PART III

1.     Jonah’s education background is in the field of Mathematics/ Science, with a more specific focus in Physics.

2.     After Alex’s wife leaves him, there is time of separation, but in chapter twenty-one he asks her out and she agrees. From there we see that they begin to date again.

3.     Bucky Burnside flies in a helicopter with Jimmy Jon to shake every employee’s hand for finishing his order in an astonishing five weeks.

4.     Ralph describes the development of human nature and logic tree in order to provide an example of finding an “intrinsic order” to things, this means to satisfy basic needs first.