Toc Constraints

Question 1: Please provide a summary of the book (15). Your answer must not exceed this page.

Alex Rogo is the plant manager at the Unico in Bearington. There are several problems in the plant. The sales are down, there is a huge backlog of overdue orders, customers are furious as orders are shipped very late, inventory is high (everywhere piled in the plant), the operational expense is high etc. Alex has been told by the divisional head, Bill Peach, that the plant will be closed in 3 months if the plant doesn’t show improvement. His marital life is also at stake. He is so busy with work that his wife feels neglected.

Alex gets tensed and tries to think of how to save his plant from being shut down. He has a very little clue how to save the plant. He recalls the conversation with his professor before he was boarding a flight from Chicago airport. Alex contacts his ex-professor, Jonah, for help and asks how he can figure out if his plant is being productive or not. From then onwards, Alex contacts Jonah several times whenever he had problems and questions about the steps needed to make his plant productive.

Jonah helps Alex to save his plant. Jonah tells Alex about the three measurements which help to attain the goal of making money and develop operational rules for running the plant. The three measurements are the throughput, inventory and operational expense. In the meantime, Alex finally realizes that goal of the plant is not only to reduce operational expense and inventory but simultaneously increase the throughput of plant.

Alex conducts several meetings with his team in his office to figure out solutions to the problems in the plant. The team members: Bob –the production manager, Stacey-the inventory manager, Lou- the plant controller, and Ralph Nakamura-the data processing manager play an important role in figuring out the various problems happening in the plant and try to come up with their solutions.

Alex and the team gets to learn fundamental principles for running a plant. They make some changes in the existing procedures and policies in the plant to improve the plant’s performance. With Jonah’s help, together the team effectively solve all the problems in the plant. Alex figures out that there are statistical fluctuations in the numerous operations processes and dependent events in the plant. Next, the team distinguishes between the resources, the bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks. The team learns that bottlenecks are important and the flow should be through the bottleneck and a tiny bit less than the demand from the market. They make changes to the operations processes in the plant. Moreover, they don’t work on non-important parts anymore and give priority to overdue orders. They make the bottlenecks work on the most overdue order to the least. Alex reduces the inventory in the plant. Ralph comes up with a schedule for bottleneck parts and when they should be released.  With Jonah’s instruction, Alex cuts batch size in half on non-bottlenecks and is able to reduce cost. With all these changes above and many other ones, Alex is able to run his plant successfully and make profits.