The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Third Revised Edition
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to unloading the furnace in a little while. I didn't think much
about it. Then around 5:30, as I was leaving for the day, I de-
cided I'd go by the furnace to ask what time the parts had actually
come out. But the same parts were still in there."
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"Two-and-a-half hours after they c ould have come out, they
hadn't been unloaded?" I ask.
"That's right," says Ralph. "So I found Sammy, the second-
shift foreman down there, and asked him what was going on. He
told me he was short-handed that night, and they'd get to it later.
He said it didn't hurt the parts to stay in the furnace. While I was there, he shut off the burners, but I found out later that the parts
didn't come out until about eight o'clock. I didn't mean to start
trouble, but I'd thought if we recorded the actual times per heat,
we'd at least have some realistic figures to use for estimating. You
see, I asked some of the hourly people down there and they told
me those kinds of delays happen a lot in heat-treat."
"No kidding," I say. "Ralph ... I want you to take all the
measurements down there that you need. Don't worry about Ted.
And do the same thing on the NCX-10."
"Well, I'd like to, but it's kind of a chore," he says. "That's why I wanted Ted and the others just to jot down the times and
all."
I say, "Okay, we'll take care of that. And, ah ... thanks
very much."
"You're welcome," he says.
"By the way, what was the other reason?" I ask him. "You
mentioned you had more than one."
"Oh, well, it's probably not that important."
"No, tell me," I say.
"I don't really know if we can do it or not," says Ralph, "but it occurred to me we might find a way to use the bottlenecks to
predict when we'll be able to ship an order."
I contemplate that possibility.
"Sounds interesting," I tell him. "Let me know what you
come up with."
Bob Donovan's ears are on fire by the time I've finished tell-
ing him what Ralph discovered about heat-treat on his own. I'm
very upset about this. He's sitting in a chair in my office while I
walk in circles in front of him.
But when I'm done, Bob tells me, "Al, the trouble is there is
nothing for the guys down there to do while heat-treat is cookin'
the parts. You load up one of the damn furnaces, shut the doors,
and that's it for six or eight hours, or however long it takes. What
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are they supposed to do? Stand around and twiddle their
thumbs?"
"I don't care what they do between times as long as they get
the parts in and out of the furnace pronto," I say. "We could have done almost another batch of parts in the five hours of waiting for
people to finish what they were doing elsewhere and change
loads."
"All right," says Bob. "How about this: we loan the people to other areas while the parts cook, but as soon as the time is up, we make sure we call them back immediately so—"
"No, because what's going to happen is everybody will be
very conscientious about it for two days, and then it'll slip back to
the way it is now," I say. "I want people at those furnaces standing by, ready to load and unload twenty-four hours a day, seven
days a week. The first ones I want assigned there are foremen
who are responsible full-time for what happens down there. And
tell Ted Spencer that the next time I see him, he'd better know
what's going on in heat-treat or I'll kick his ass."
"You bet," says Bob. "But you know you're talking about
two, maybe three people per shift."
"Is that all?" I ask. "Don't you remember what lost time on a bottleneck costs us?"
"Okay, I'm with you," he says. "Tell you the truth, what
Ralph found out about heat-treat is a lot like what I found out on
my own about those rumors of idle time on the NCX-10."
"What's going on there?"
Bob tells me that, indeed, it's true the NCX-10 is sitting idle
for as much as half an hour or more at a time. But the problem is
not lunch breaks. If the NCX-10 is being set up and lunch time
rolls around, the two guys stay until the setup is completed. Or, if
the setup is a long one, they spell each other, so one goes and eats
while the other continues with the setup. We're covered fine dur-
ing breaks. But if the machine stops, say, in the middle of the
afternoon, it may sit there for twenty, thirty, forty minutes or so
before anyone gets around to starting a new setup. The reason is
the setup people are busy with other machines, with non-bottle-
necks.
"Then let's do the same thing on the NCX-10 as I want to do
on heat-treat," I tell Bob. "Let's get a machinist and a helper and have them permanently stationed at the NCX-10. When it stops,
they can get to work on it immediately."
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"That's just dandy with me," says Bob. "But you know how
it's going to look on paper. It's going to seem like we increased
the direct labor content of the parts coming out of heat-treat and
the NCX-10."
I slump into the chair behind my desk.
"Let's fight one battle at a time," I say.
The next morning, Bob comes to the staff meeting with his
recommendations. They basically consist of four actions. The first
two concern what he and I talked about the day before—dedicat-
ing a machinist and helper to the NCX-10, and stationing a fore-
man and two workers at the heat-treat furnaces. The assignments
would apply to all three shifts. The other two recommendations
concern offloading the bottlenecks. Bob has determined if we
could activate one each of these old machines—the Zmegma and
the two others—just one shift a day, we could add eighteen per-
cent to the output of parts of the type produced by the NCX-10.
Last of all, is that we take some of the parts queued at heat-treat
and send them out to the vendor across town.
As he's presenting these, I'm wondering what Lou is going to
say. As it happens, Lou offers little resistance.
"Knowing what we know now," says Lou, "it's perfectly legitimate for us to assign people to the bottlenecks if it will increase
our throughput. We can certainly justify the cost if it increases
sales—and thereby increases cash flow. My question is, where are
you going to get the people?"
Bob says we could call them back from layoff.
"No, you can't. See, the problem we have," says Lou, "is that the division has a recall freeze in effect. We can't recall without
their approval."
"Do we have people in the plant who can do these jobs?" asks
Stacey.
"You mean steal people from other areas?" asks Bob.
"Sure," I say. "Take people from the non-bottlenecks. By
definition, they have excess capacity anyway."
Bob thinks about it for a minute. Then h
e explains that find-
ing helpers for heat-treat is no big deal. And we do have some old
machinists, who haven't been laid off because of seniority, who
are qualified to run the Zmegma and the other two machines.
Establishing a two-person set-up crew on the NCX-10, however,
has him worried.
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"Who's going to set up the other machines?" he asks.
"The helpers on the other machines know enough to set up
their own equipment," I say.
"Well, I guess we can try it," says Bob. "But what happens if stealing people turns non-bottlenecks into bottlenecks?"
I tell him, "The important thing is to maintain the flow. If we
take a worker away, and we can't maintain the flow, then we'll put
the worker back and steal a body from someplace else. And if we
still can't keep the flow going, then we'll have no choice but to go
to a division and insist that we either go to overtime or call a few
people back from layoff."
"Okay," says Bob. "I'll go for it."
Lou gives us his blessing.
"Good. Let's do it," I say. "And, Bob, make sure the people you pick are good. From now on, we put only our best people to
work on the bottlenecks."
And so it is done.
The NCX-10 gets a dedicated setup crew. The Zmegma and
the other machines go to work. The outfit across town is only too
glad to take our surplus parts for heat-treating. And in our own
heat-treat department, two people per shift are assigned to stand
by, ready to load and unload parts from the furnaces. Donovan
juggles the work-center responsibilities so heat-treat has a fore-
man there at all times.
For a foreman, heat-treat seems like a very small kingdom,
not much of a prize. There is nothing intrinsically attractive about
running that operation, and having only two people to manage
makes it seem like no big deal. To prevent it from seeming like a
demotion to them, I make a point to go down there periodically
on each of the shifts. In talking to the foreman, I drop some
rather direct hints that the rewards will be great for anyone who
can improve the output of heat-treated parts.
Shortly thereafter, some amazing things happen. Very early
one morning, I'm down there at the end of third shift. A young
guy named Mike Haley is the foreman. He's a big black man
whose arms always look as though they're going to burst the
sleeves on his shirts. We've noticed that over the past week he's
pushed about ten percent more parts through heat-treat on his
shift than the others have. Records are not usually set on third
shift, and we're starting to wonder if it's Mike's biceps that are
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doing the trick. Anyway, I go down there to try to learn what he's
doing.
As I walk up, I see the two helpers are not just standing
around with nothing to do. They're moving parts. In front of the
furnaces are two tightly organized stacks of work-in-process,
which the helpers are building. I call Mike over and ask him what
they're doing.
"They're getting ready," he says.
"What do you mean?"
"They're getting ready for when we have to load one of the
furnaces again," he says. "The parts in each stack are all treated at the same temperature."
"So you're splitting and overlapping some batches," I say.
"Sure," he says. "I know we're not really supposed to do
that, but you need the parts, right?"
"Sure, no problem. You're still doing the treating according
to the priority system?" I ask.
"Oh, yeah," he says. "Come here. Let me show you."
Mike leads me past the control console for the furnaces to a
worn old battleship of a desk. He finds the computer print-out
for the week's most important overdue orders.
"See, look at number 22," he says pointing to it. "We need
fifty of the high stress RB-dash-11's. They get treated at a 1200-
degree temperature cycle. But fifty of them won't fill up the fur-
nace. So we look down and what do we see here but item number
31, which calls for 300 fitted retaining rings. Those also take a
1200-degree cycle."
"So you'll fill up the furnace with as many of the retaining
rings after you've loaded the fifty of the first item," I say.
"Yeah, that's it," says Mike. "Only we do the sorting and
stacking in advance so we can load the furnace faster."
"That's good thinking," I tell him.
"Well, we could do even better if I could get someone to
listen to an idea I got," he says.
"What do you have in mind?"
"Well, right now, it takes anywhere up to an hour or so to
change a furnace load using the crane or doing it by hand. We
could cut that down to a couple of minutes if we had a better
system." He points to the furnaces. "Each one of those has a table which the parts sit on. They slide in and out on rollers. If we
could get some steel plate and maybe a little help from engineer-
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ing, we could make those tables interchangeable. That way we
could stack a load of parts in advance and switch loads with the
use of a forklift. If it saves us a couple of hours a day, that means
we can do an extra heat of parts over the course of a week."
I look from the furnaces back to Mike. I say, "Mike, I want
you to take tomorrow night off. We'll get one of the other fore-
men to cover for you."
"Sounds good to me," he says with a grin. "How come?"
"Because the day after tomorrow, I want you on day turn.
I'm going to have Bob Donovan put you together with an I.E. to
write up these procedures formally, so we can start using them
round the clock," I tell him. "You keep that mind of yours work-
ing. We need it."
Later that morning, Donovan happens by my office.
"Hi, there," he says.
"Well, hello," I tell him. "Did you get my note on Haley?"
"It's being taken care of," says Bob.
"Good. And let's make sure he gets some more money out of
this whenever the wage freeze is lifted," I say.
"Okay," says Bob as a smile spreads across his face. Then he
leans against the doorway.
"Something else?" I ask.
"Got good news for you," says Bob.
"How good?"
"Remember when Jonah asked us if all the parts going
through heat-treat really needed it?"
I tell him I remember.
"I just found out that in three cases, it wasn't engineering
that specified heat-treat. It was us," says Bob.
"What do you mean?"
He explains that about five years ago some group of hot-
shots were trying to improve the efficiencies of several of the
machining centers. To speed up the processing, the cutting tool
"bite" was increased. So on each pass, instead of shaving a chi
p that was a millimeter thick, the tool took off three millimeters.
But increasing the amount of metal taken off on each pass made
the metal brittle. And this necessitated heat-treating.
"The thing is, the machines we made more efficient happen
to be non-bottlenecks," says Bob. "We have enough capacity on
them to slow down and still meet demand. And if we go back to
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the slower processing, we don't need the heat-treat . Which means
we can take about twenty percent of the current load off the
furnaces."
"Sounds fantastic," I tell him. "What about getting it ap-
proved by engineering?"
"That's the beauty of it," says Bob. "We were the ones who initiated the change five years ago."
"So if it was our option to begin with," I say, "we can change it back any time we want."
"Right! We don't need to get an engineering change order,
because we already have an approved procedure on the books,"
says Bob.
He leaves shortly with my blessing to implement the change
as soon as possible. I sit there marveling that we're going to reduce
the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more
productive. They'd never believe it on the fifteenth floor.
E.M. Goldratt
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24
It's a Friday afternoon. Out in the parking lot, the people on
first shift are getting into their cars to go home. There is the usual
congestion at the gate. I'm in my office—minding my own busi-
ness—when suddenly, from through the half-open door . . .
BAM!
Something ricochets off the ceiling tiles. I jump to my feet,
check myself for wounds and, finding none, search the carpet for
the offending missile. It's a champagne cork.
There is laughing outside my door. In the next instant, it
seems as though everyone is in my office. There is Stacey, Bob
Donovan (who holds the bottle from which the cork came),
Ralph, Fran, a couple of the secretaries, and a swarm of other
people—even Lou joins us. Fran hands me one of the styrofoam
coffee cups she's dispensing to everyone. Bob fills it from the
bottle.
"What's this all about?" I ask.
"I'll tell you in the toast I'm g°ing to make as soon as every-
one has something to swallow," says Bob.