THE GOAL

Hari Prasad 133043 Alex Rogo, the protagonist in the story was going through a rough phase in his life. The situation was worse at the plant and neither was it so good at home. The meeting with Jonah, his old physics teacher/ production consultant had become the turning point of his life. Under the guidance of Jonah, his family and application of his intelligence, Alex and his team went on to discover the Theory of constraints. The story revolves around saving a manufacturing plant, but the ways adopted to save will apply to any industry and any business. This book will help us understand what the Goal really is for any business as well as for our lives. The book presents an opportunity to learn new methods, new measurements and new thinking, challenging the existing methods and practices. The journey through this book will help us in proving theories to ourselves and derive our own conclusions.

Whats the Goal?

Alex was wondering how could he not able to show profitability even after increasing the operating efficiency. After running into Jonah, he realizes that the goal of any organization is to make money. All other factors like efficiency, productivity only help in achieving that goal of making money and they are not the real goals. Alex figured out that the three key factors in achieving the goal are throughput, inventory and operational overheads. Alex was under the impression that the robots increased the efficiency by 36%. Jonah made him understand that the use of robots did not increase their productivity, did not cut down the costs and did not increase the market share. A very important lesson that we could draw from this is that any activity that does not add value to the business is non-productive and we should be trying to eliminate them.

Bottleneck
In the second meeting with Jonah, Alex encounters the term bottleneck and gets puzzled. Almost all of us would have faced similar situation in our lives trying to figure what is wrong in the procedure when we think we are doing everything right, only without identifying what the bottleneck is. The moment when Alex realizes that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link through Herbie, he was on the right track to recover the plant. He identified that NCX-10 was his Herbie in his plant. He started increasing its capacity, made sure that bottleneck machines are always running, reduced the batch size and introduced a buffer before the bottleneck. This resulted in the inventory reduction, a reduced lead time. And most importantly it freed the money locked in the system. Eventually he could eliminate NCX-10 as the bottleneck and started to find the next bottleneck. Hence the result is achieving the target of 15% improvement in the production. What that Hiking trip has taught us is, decide how to exploit the systems constraint(s). Make the most of Herbie. Only have critical work run through that constraint. Get more hands on deck to take over some of Herbies load. Have Herbie run at full capacity at all times. Subordinate all else to that decision. Herbie alone makes or breaks the success of the system. One way or another, increase Herbies capacity. If in this process a constraint is broken, go back to finding new Herbie. This is an ongoing process of improvement. One situation which is very common to all us and can draw analogy to this bottleneck is our group assignments submission which can be done only after the slowest person finishes it. Different group employ different strategies in improving their teams efficiency. We focus on helping that person understanding the subject and concepts involved in the task, hence resulting in a mutual benefit both for the member and the team.

Conclusion
This book is overall a great experience. Presenting the ideas of operations management in the form of novel is a gripping one. How to turn nonsense into common sense is a greatest lesson for life. Managing the work-life balance is the most difficult task for the professionals these days. The author concludes by emphasizing the importance of work-life balance and showing that Alex and his wife lived happily ever after.