The Goal: A process of ongoing improvement is a business novel written by Eliyahu M.

Goldratt, where the full story is based around the challenges in both professional & personal life
of the protagonist Mr. Alex Rogo, plant manager of a manufacturing company named UniCo.
The main focus of this novel is the process of continuous improvement in a manufacturing
organization, where plant manager goes through different struggling & confusing situations for
his decision making in order to increase productivity. Though this book exemplified the
manufacturing company but it has uncovered fundamental areas of any business organization
where simple modifications can increase the overall efficiency level. Here, author tries to bring
change in thinking process against conventional business practices. Maximizing overall
operational efficiency of available resources through analyzing bottlenecks & other constraints
helps to achieve company’s main goal. On the other hand, conflicting situations in balancing
personal & professional life has also been portrayed in this book by bringing Alex & his wife
Julie’s continuous try of searching the goal of their marriage.

The beginning of the story moves on with a problem when Alex asked about the bad
performance of his plant by the Division Vice President Bill peach in division meeting at UniCo
headquarter. The plant would be shut down by the management if Alex fails to turn around the
situation of his plant in upcoming three months. In the mean time Alex found his old physics
professor, Jonah as a consultant afterwards for improving his plant’s condition. Problems like
high inventories, delayed shipments etc. all were coming one by one throughout every chapter of
this book.

Identifying the true goal of any organization is the primary key to be successful, that’s how
Jonah strikes Alex initially to think differently about his problem. All efforts should be aligned
with company’s goal. In order to reach closer to that goal, employees should increase their
productivity while this productivity is totally meaningless if they don’t know about the actual
goal of their organization. Though it was simple for Alex to say about his goal that just making
money, however he started to realize that making activities more productive & leaving
nonproductive actions would lead his company to reach its ultimate goal.

Delayed shipments, unnecessary inventories & backlog of productions were the problems
predicted by Jonah. He asked Alex to be more focused on their plant bottlenecks. While
searching for bottlenecks suggested by Jonah, Alex came to understand about more specific
measurements which were:

Inventory: defined as the invested money in purchasing items that will be sold.

Throughput: defined as the rate at which the system generates money through sales.
Operational Expense: defined as money used to turn inventory into throughput.

These three measurements helped Alex to identify the way of expressing their true goal which is
to increase throughput more while reducing both inventories & operational expenses at the same
time. In searching the meaning of all three measurements Alex found the increased operational
expense due to newly acquired robot which is becoming non productive in reaching company’s
true objective or goal.

Though Alex was trying to focus only on robots Jonah was more concerned about the ways he is
managing the plant capacity. As every one of the plants are doing work all the time, Jonah
termed it as an inefficient plant. However, a balanced plant doesn’t always have the balanced
resources in terms of the demand in the market, rather it needs to have balanced product in terms
of the plant, according to Jonah. The goal shouldn’t be achieved by improving only one
measurement rather all three needs to be improved. Jonah also brought the concept of dependent
events & statistical fluctuations for not blaming the robots only. Reduced throughput arises only
when bottlenecks resist the production level. That’s how Alex became more focused with his
team to identify the real bottlenecks. Alex & his team were trying to ensure that no capacity is
being wasted due to bottleneck machines. They shifted quality control before bottleneck
machines which allows them to identify the parts below standard quality & keep them away from
wasting capacities by reaching bottleneck machines. Additionally, they introduced a strategy of
tagging for prioritizing overdue orders. That’s how they were able to increase their throughputs
while decreasing inventory & operating expense, which in turn increased profitability.

After taking advantage of system’s capacity Alex & his team were able to show some
profitability by increasing overall efficiency of the operation. However, non bottleneck machines
started to have excess capacity. As a result, higher inventory & finished goods were being
produced for lack of timing. Faster release of materials than bottleneck’s processing ability were
the reason for these problems. Alex & his team started to develop a system in this case by
consulting with Jonah. They introduced a signaling system to identify when materials should be
sent to bottleneck machines. They also reduced the batch size to reduce lead time on orders.
Consequently, faster delivery became possible according to market demand. That’s how Alex
started to increase their sales & return as well.

Apart from all those challenges faced by Alex Rogo, he was struggling with his personal life as
well. Alex & his wife Julie were arguing continuously for being late from offices due to ongoing
working pressure. Alex was struggling to maintain work life balance. At certain point, Julie was
bound to leave him. Alex couldn’t keep his promises to his wife or family because too much
involvement in professional life. Through this personal problems author also tried to establish a
goal for marriage or long relationship. There is a link between personal & professional life. If
anyone focuses only one side , his other side will definitely be affected. Through these personal
events author tried to show the necessity of work life balance in human life. Most importantly
persons with contemporary work life always face such problems in their real life.

In order to solve throughput process Alex & his team eventually came up with a five step
process. Those five step process includes:

1) Identifying the system constraints

2) Deciding how to exploit the system’s constraints.

3) Subordinate everything else to step two decisions.

4) Evaluating system bottlenecks.

5) Going back to step one, if any bottleneck has been broken in previous steps.