“THE GOAL” book review-Prateek Chaturvedi(2010295)

The book is written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox. An excellent curtain raiser for
manufacture industry aspirants. The story revolves around Alex Rago, plant manager,
who is in a very undesirable situation of life where he has to manage his plant which
is running under losses and his personal life. His plant has undergone various
downfalls and is now on verge of shutting down for which he gets an ultimatum too.
Due to work centric approach his wife left him and now he is state where he has to
restore the plant n marriage.

Alex gets in touch with a professor Jonah who helps Alex by a series of steps to
improve the conditions. Jonah is a kind of teacher who encourages his students to
discover answers on their own and he does that same with Alex (regarding the
problem with his plant). They explore and challenged the conventional methods of
operational sciences despite the tremendous pressure of sceptical boss. He helps Alex
to improve the efficiency and productivity by identifying and reducing the bottlenecks
in the system by looking the situation in “out of the box” approach. Alex learnt the
most important lesson of manufacturing industry, the GOAL, which is to “make
money” and not cut costs, reduce wages, increase efficiency, or any of the other
traditional measures. He learnt about balancing the 3 critical components of a plant
which are to checked and monitored simultaneously to reach the GOAL. They are:

 Inventory control-to reduce it to optimum level

 Operational expenses-reduced expenses result in increased profit
 Throughput-increase it for best utilization.

He makes the executable plans with the help of Jonah and learnt about chain of
dependent processes which, if loosened, can hamper the productions thereby affecting
performance of the system. Alex also worked on changing the thought process of
employees and the process itself which he named as “Theory of Constraints” stated
as in 5 steps:

 Identify the constraint

 Exploit the constraint (or bottleneck) by keeping it running and maximize its output as
much as possible
 Subordinate. Get everything to run at a pace that keeps up to the bottleneck, to avoid
inventory jams.
 Elevate. Increase the throughput of the constraints no matter the costs since they limit
the entire system throughput.
 Repeat with new constraints. As constraints are improve, new constraints will emerge,
repeat with these next.

There is so much to learn from the book about manufacturing industry. It helps us to
develop leadership skills and how and when to change the thought process.