53 pages • 1 hour read
Eliyahu M. GoldrattA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Jonah visits the plant, and the team attempts to explain the spread of the bottlenecks. Jonah challenges their assumption, asking, “How do you know it’s really a bottleneck?” (203). Alex suggests that they expedite orders further, but Jonah cautions against it—they’ll only become reliant on expediting. Jonah explains that they are overusing certain machines and creating excess inventory. Alex realizes that “by running non-bottlenecks for efficiency, we’ve built inventories far in excess of demand” (209). They are not allowing the bottlenecks to determine the pace and need of the non-bottlenecks, and so have created machines that run with no purpose. The non-bottleneck must never “determine throughput for the system” (209). Non-bottlenecks cannot determine their own utilization—another constraint in the system must do that. Bob protests against slowing down non-bottlenecks to match bottlenecks, claiming this will lower efficiency rates. “So what?’” Jonah asks. Ralph understands what Jonah means, pointing out that making a machine or employee work isn’t the same as being able to profit from the work. Jonah agrees. Through their actions, the team has created bottlenecks. Jonah has a solution.
At home, Alex struggles to understand the solution to his plant’s problem. Sharon and Davey ask to help, and Alex lets them. He explains the situation in terms of Herbie on the hike. In this case, Herbie can’t be moved from the middle of the line. So, what next? Sharon suggests a drummer—someone to help set the pace. Davey suggests tying ropes to everyone, so that moving at one’s own pace isn’t possible. Alex agrees that these are good ideas, but then points out the flaws. Keeping pace doesn’t require a drummer or rope; it just requires “keeping the kid at the front of the line from walking faster than Herbie” (215). The next morning, the team reconvenes. Their solution is to let the “Herbies” determine “when to let more inventory into the system” (216) using computers rather than drummers or ropes. They will release less material to the non-bottlenecks and use a computer program to predict when to release more. This has an added advantage—“If Ralph can determine a schedule for releasing red tag materials […] he can also determine a schedule for final assembly” (217). They will be able to accurately predict when products will be shipped, making their customers happy. Bob worries that efficiency rates will drop, and they will. Alex advises him to fudge the reports so that Bill Peach doesn’t find out.
By the end of the month, things have drastically improved at the plant. Ralph’s system has worked well, and Alex can now predict “within a day, more or less, when a shipment will leave the plant” (220). Efficiencies did fall at first, but there are no more back orders waiting to be fulfilled, and Bill Peach “stiffly” (221) congratulates Alex on his successes at a plant manager meeting. After the meeting, Alex and Bill talk, and Alex tries to convince Bill to keep the plant open. Bill is worried that Alex’s success is a “‘flash in the pan’” (222) and demands even greater improvement in the next two months—a total increase of fifteen percent on the bottom line. Alex realizes something very quickly: “We need more business” (224). Alex drives to Julie’s parents’ house to pick her up for another date. He asks her to move back home, but she’s reluctant. She likes their dates and doesn’t want to go back to the way things were. She reveals that she had a clear plan for how her life would turn out, and it isn’t quite matching up. Alex asks her what the goal of marriage is, but she thinks that’s a silly question. Alex urges her to put aside her “preconceptions” (228) about married life. She agrees to think about it, and they decide to see each other again the following weekend.
Alex arrives home and picks up a call from Jonah. Alex tells Jonah about Bill Peach’s new demand. The next day at work, he informs his advisory team about Jonah’s latest suggestion: cut “batch sizes in half on non-bottlenecks” (230). With half the work-in-progress, they will only need half the investment, which will improve cash flow. To do that, they need more frequent deliveries from suppliers. At lunch, he explains to the team that Jonah has divided the time a material spends in the plant into four parts: setup, process time, queue time, and wait time. Setup is the time spent waiting for a resource to prepare to work on the material, process time is spent as the resource works, queue time is spent in line with other materials ahead of it, and wait time is when a material waits for a different material needed for final assembly. For bottlenecks, “queue is dominant” and for non-bottlenecks, “wait is dominant” (232). If they can reduce these times, products ship faster and the plant gains the marketplace advantage.
On Friday, Alex drives to UniCo headquarters to meet with the head of marketing, Johnny Jons. Alex explains their new process and asks Jons for new clients. Alex claims that he can turn an order around in four weeks, when it used to be four months. Jons is shocked and skeptical but agrees to try and hustle some new clients. “If you ship any new orders in less than five weeks” (236), Jons says, “I’ll buy you a new pair of shoes” (236).
Jonah makes an especially important point in this section of the novel: “Activating a resource and utilizing a resource are not synonymous” (210). When he first told Alex, way back at the airport, that a plant where all workers were constantly busy was very inefficient, Alex was baffled. Here, Jonah finally explains what he meant. Just because a plant or company makes an employee or machine work does not mean that they are profiting from that work. Of course, work done without profit is a net loss; the company must still pay the worker or maintain the machine, but they gain nothing in return. Though Bob is understandably worried by the impact idle workers and machines will have on their efficiency rating, Jonah dismisses his concerns. By creating work that does not need to be done, by creating products the market cannot use, the plant is losing money. Lowered efficiencies are one thing, a net loss in profit or diminished cash flow is a more serious issue. Furthermore, Jonah sees an hour saved at a non-bottleneck machine as a “mirage” (233). The hour saved is not truly saving the company money but costing it. Though it might seem that saving on the setup of a machine would save money in terms of machinist wages or parts used, Alex realizes it is okay to have more setups on non-bottleneck machines, since such machines would only be sitting idle, anyway. Once again, Bob, Alex, and the rest of the team must put aside their notions of what is “effective” or “efficient” in order to truly profit from Jonah’s solutions.