The Goal

The next morning, Alex struggles to get the kids ready for school and out the door. Their breakfast is ruined, they miss the school bus, and Alex arrives at work very late. He has a message from Hilton Smyth and calls him back. Smyth yells at him over yet another late order and demands that the order be shipped by the end of the day. Smyth has just been appointed the division productivity manager, and Alex will be expected to “report on a dotted line to Smyth” (126).

Alex calls a meeting with Bob, Lou, and Stacey, and then includes Ralph Nakamura, “who runs data processing” (126). He reveals what he’s learned over the weekend on the hike. Again, Lou is skeptical, and Bob is again not having any of it. “Robots don’t have statistical fluctuations” (127), he claims. Alex tries to come up with a plan to ship all 100 products required for the late order by the end of the day. The machinists would have to work at a rate of 25 pieces an hour, but Alex knows that due to statistical fluctuation, they may be short of, or over some pieces at any given time. The robot is more precise, and can process 25 pieces an hour, but it can’t work until the materials have been delivered by the machinists. Alex bets Bob that the order won’t ship. He asks Bob to keep records of exactly how many pieces both the machinists and the robot produce in each hour.

Alex goes to pick up his kids and has his mother watch them, temporarily. When he returns to work, Bob happily informs him that the order has been fulfilled. Alex won’t concede defeat until he sees the products on the delivery truck. Bob shows him the chart of how many pieces the machinists finished, and just as Alex thought, it fluctuates greatly. They go down to the machine floor to see the robot still working on the order, which baffles Bob, since the machinists completed all of the necessary 100 pieces. Alex explains that since the machinists were under quota for the first two hours of work, the lower number of pieces “became the robot’s true capacity” (133), instead of the 25 the robot is capable of. The products are not ready to move onto the delivery truck, and the driver can’t wait. Bob gives Alex ten dollars. 

Alex returns home to find that Julie called but refused to say where she was staying. The next day, Alex calls a meeting with his advisory team. He declares that they have to “change the way [they] think about production capacity” (137). Stacey suggests calling Jonah again. When Jonah answers, Alex tells him about the hike and what he’s discovered: “[…] we shouldn’t be looking at each local area and trying to trim it. We should be trying to optimize the whole system” (138), Alex decides. Jonah agrees, and suggests that they try to balance flow rather than capacity. He uses the term “bottleneck” (139) to define any resource that cannot keep up with the demand placed upon it by other resources. Herbie, Alex correctly guesses, was a bottleneck on the hike. The team sets off in search of the “Herbie” in the plant, and eventually find the NCX-10, the broken machine mentioned at the beginning of the novel. It’s a new machine that can accomplish many tasks, but it’s the only one of its kind. It doesn’t require the same amount of machinist attention, but because it’s unique, the market need is greater than its capacity. They then find a second “Herbie”—the heat treat department. It is a bottleneck because it never works on full batches of parts. Alex decides that the best course of action is to reorganize the plant around these machines, just as he reorganized the hike around Herbie. 

Alex eats dinner with his mother and children and attempts to explain the problem he is facing with the bottlenecks to them. Later, he meets up with Jonah, who has agreed to visit the plant to see if he can help. Jonah meets the advisory team and advises them that the only way to increase their throughput and cash flow is to “find more capacity” (152)—but only on the bottlenecks. They all visit the NCX-10, which is not running because the machinists are on their break. Jonah suggests they take their break while the machine is running, not while it is idle. Jonah also suggests they find the old machines they used in place of the NCX-10 because while the NCX-10 can do multiple things, its uniqueness hurts productivity. Jonah then visits the heat treat furnace and asks if there are alternatives to heat treating so many parts; perhaps they could outsource to another company. Stacey protests that this will raise costs, but Jonah sees thousands of dollars lying in the pile of untreated parts by the furnace. They then go to the quality control inspection area. The parts deemed to be of poor quality sit on pallets. Jonah asks if the parts went through a bottleneck machine, which they did. Jonah points out that this means the parts are not only un-usable, but they cost time on a machine that already doesn’t have enough time. “If you scrap a part before it reaches the bottleneck, all you have lost is a scrapped part,’’ he says. “But if you scrap the part after it’s passed the bottleneck, you have lost time that cannot be recovered” (157). The most important thing is to make sure that a bottleneck’s time isn’t wasted, and to limit the bottleneck’s work to those parts that are most important—what will make money that day.

Alex goes home, and his mother tells him that when Sharon was talking to Julie, she heard Julie’s father’s favorite song playing in the background. Alex guesses that Julie must have gone to her parents’ house.