The Goal : A Process Of Ongoing Improvement

Alex comes up with the consensus that the “Goal” of his business and many others is to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment and their cash flow at the plant. This basically means to make money. These three measurements can be achieved by looking closer into his second set of measurements. Alex specifically must find a way to increase throughput while at the same time decreasing it inventory and operational expenses. All three of these measurements must be cautiously monitored since they all rely on each other to be obtained in balance. Factors that cause throughput, inventory, and operational expenses to become unbalanced are excess manpower and balance capacity of the demand of resources in the market.

It is stressed in the Goal that there is a massive difference between throughput and efficiency. The novel makes the case that having an efficient operation does not equate to profitability. What does equate to profitability is to increase the throughput of any given operations system. Jonah tells Alex, “Throughput, is the rate in which the system generates money through sales.” (Goldratt, E.M. (2014), The Goal, pg. 60). Jonah goes on to explain to Alex that inventory is all the money that was invested in purchasing things that the system intends to sell. (Id). Furthermore, operational expenses are those costs that are required to turn inventory into throughput. (Id, at pg. 61). The definitions of these three measurements are not standard definitions for an MBA student. It is an interesting perspective on how to view operations.

The novel, “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement”, by Eliyahu Goldratt focuses on a production plant that has a failing system which can potentially shut down if the system that it operates under does not right itself and show improvements. The book is structured like a business textbook but is written as a novel. “The Goal” uses a scenario in the production world that can occur to any production manager. Eliyahu Goldratt uses the main character, Alex Rogo a plant manager with UniCo Company for the past 15 years, puts him in the students seat. It helps business students learn with Alex and makes it very relative.

Alex comes up with the consensus that the “Goal” of his business and many others is to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment and their cash flow at the plant. This basically means to make money. These three measurements can be achieved by looking closer into his second set of measurements. Alex specifically must find a way to increase throughput while at the same time decreasing it inventory and operational expenses. All three of these measurements must be cautiously monitored since they all rely on each other to be obtained in balance. Factors that cause throughput, inventory, and operational expenses to become unbalanced are excess manpower and balance capacity of the demand of resources in the market.

My experience in this course has given me a boarder knowledge on how to implement a change project. Performance improvement projects are used to create a safe and efficient delivery of care to patients.

Say we have identified the bottleneck machine of a production process. List at least four things suggested in the book that will result in a greater throughput without actually expanding the physical capacity of the machine.

For this discussion board assignment I have chosen to further research the key term of continuous improvement. My main reason for wanting to do further research into this topic is out of a general curiosity and interest of mine as well as how it is relevant to my current job. Ever since learning about the Toyota Production System (TPS) and lean manufacturing a year ago while taking another class at Liberty University, I have been continuing to learn as much as I can about it. I think that lean manufacturing is so interesting and has a lot of value for manufacturing as well as many other fields and even in my daily life. Continuous improvement is a big part of lean manufacturing, so that is why I chose to write about this topic.

In the article Aims, Goals and Objectives, Nel Noddings states that “Aims are used not only to derive goals and objectives but also to evaluate them.” (Noddings, Aims, Goals and Objectives, 2007). She also believes that educational aims should be directed towards making the lives of everyone full and satisfying as opposed to changing all people into members of the educational elite (Noddings, Aims, Goals and Objectives, 2007). Reflecting on these points has brought up a facet of the aims argument that I had not previously considered and has helped me identify areas for improvement in my teaching career. In the paragraphs that follow, I will first provide a summary of the article that details the author’s main ideas and key points and then I

Being able to increase productivity and revenues has always been the greatest challenge of any manager, and the manager of RL Wolfe, a plastic pipe manufacturer, was not an exception. Because of the low-efficiency percentage RL Wolfe had in comparison to their its competitors, John Amasi, director of Production and Engineering , had no other choice then came up with a new way of improving RL Wolfe production methods.

Eliyahu M Goldratt purpose of writing this book is to introduce individuals to how to manage and measure effectively. Goldratt illustrates how the accounting cost figures and productivity per machine can actually be problematic for it misleads individuals into thinking they’re achieving the goal. Rather all attention should be focused on strategy planning and managing the bottlenecks because they are the true driving metric of production. One major takeaway message from this novel is that there is always room for improvement. This philosophy of ongoing improvement originated in a Toyotas production system and is better know as the Kaizen theory. The Novel, stresses the Kaizen theory, which starts with an indication, then an in-depth analysis, followed by a diagnosis, eventually arrive ate a hypothesis and ending with

Every production system needs some control point or points to control the flow of product through the system. If the system contains a bottleneck then the bottleneck is the best place for control. The control point is called the drum because it will strike the beat that the rest of the system uses to function. If there is no bottleneck, then the next best place to set the drum would be a capacity-constrained resource. If neither a bottleneck nor a capacity constrained resource is present, the control point can be

The bottlenecks are the areas (machines) in the plant that are constantly holding back the production of the finished product. The philosophy behind this will become clear in a moment.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement is an interesting book. It not complicated or written for big corporation management level. It is just a basic book, with basic logic and thinking and basic words that anyone can understand. The basis of the book is a story that demonstrates, based on basic common sense, the process of ongoing improvement but more precisely the theory of constraints. The book is basically a novel for the business world. It is story about how to improve an operation plants when there is so much going on in one’s life.

These two bottlenecks constrained the whole process. Alex and his colleagues were happy to identify two "Hebie"s, NCX-10 and Heat Treatment Department, which bottlenecked a flow sufficient to meet demand and make money. So the only thing to do was to find more capacity. To increase the capacity of the plant was to increase the capacity of only the bottlenecks. To increase the capacity of bottlenecks did not mean to install new machine, but to find the hidden capacity. With the help of Jonah, Alex found the NCX-10 had 1-hour idle time, as the union contract stipulated that there must be a half-hour break after every four hours work. The hours lost in the breaks of NCX-10 were enormously expensive because the throughput for the entire plant had been lowered by the bottleneck. The problem of the second "Hebie", heat treat, was that they didn 't make the bottleneck work on the parts contributed to throughput and many products were unable to be shipped without the parts in pile for treatment. What was more, they only did most inspections prior to final assembly but never inspected the parts before bottleneck. It easily let defects go through bottleneck and lost time in the bottleneck could not be recovered. The cost of one hour lost in these two bottlenecks is the cost of an hour lost in the system, which is computed as the total expense of the system divided by

I read the fictional book called, The goal: A process of ongoing improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff cox. Goldratt has an extensive history of writing novels about business problems and their solutions. His list of work includes; The race, The haystack syndrome, What is This Thing Called Theory of Constraints and How Should it be Implemented?, It’s not luck, critical chain, and necessary but not sufficient. With his most recent work being in 2009 called Isn’t it obvious focusing on retail. The authors purpose for writing this book would be to educate and show examples on how to think outside the box or solve solutions, possibly even save companies. In his own words, “This book is an attempt to show that we can postulate a very small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a very large spectrum of industrial phenomena” (Goldratt, Intro to revised edition page 2). He states he wants to show that these methods aren’t fantasy and have been/are working in pants around the world, and says that, “Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see” (Goldratt, Introduction page 2). This story is about a failing or close to failing manufacturing plant in a place called Bearington. The novel begins with the main character Alex Rogo, a