While at a meeting with other plant and division managers, Alex remembers a meeting he once had with a man named Jonah. Alex was explaining how productive his plant was, but Jonah wasn’t quite sure that this was really the way to be a successful plant. Jonah continues to tell Alex that he needs to know what the goal is. Without knowing the goal, one cannot understand the meaning of productivity. After some time of thinking on

The author of the books basically talks about discovering the bottlenecks in a manufacturing facility and working with these in order the reach the goal of an organization: to make money. This book relates well to some of the things we have learned in class. In striving towards a quality based organization, we talked about how quality shouldn’t be measured with inspection in final assembly. Instead it should be built into the system and start early in the system. Alex and his staff moved their quality control in front of the bottlenecks instead of inspecting after final assembly. This saved them from realizing poor quality products at the end of production, but instead helped them to find these products earlier in the process. This can save money. Also, the author describes reaching the goal as a process of ongoing improvement. As we can see from the book, even as they made improvements to the system there were still issues that came up. This suggests that improving a system is continuously happening. There is no way to have a perfect system; therefore, continuous improvements must be done. The author also talked about how one must not simply strive for local improvements. We have to look at it more broadly and try to improve the entire system. Just making one process better may not lead to an improvement to the entire system.

After Alex and his colleagues did some checking, they found that the problem with late shipping has to do with the many parts produced by the bottlenecks that don’t arrive quickly. Ninety percent of the current over dues had parts that flowed through one or both of the bottleneck operations. Because of this a product will sit in final assembly ready to go except for the part from the bottleneck. The bottleneck is slowest. Because of this problem, with late orders, Alex and his crew set up a system. They first found out which orders were the latest. These were top priority. A list was generated in this fashion from latest to earliest. They then attached red tags to any materials needing to be processed by a bottleneck. These with red tags were to be worked on first. All others were marked with a green tag. Because of this priority system, the bottlenecks began getting their parts quickly and the red-tagged items began getting to final assembly faster. Alex and his employees were seeing great improvement and began to make other changes such as sending parts queued at heat treat to vendors across town and setting up older machines to do the same work as the NCX-10.

Jonah soon visits the plant. He explains that there are bottleneck resources and non-bottleneck resources. He says a bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. He explains that they need to balance flow, not capacity. The idea is to make the flow through the bottleneck equal to the demand from the market. In walking through the plant, they identify two bottlenecks: the NCX-10 and the heat treating. There are piles upon piles of inventory stacked up in front of these machines. Jonah explains that the amount of money represented in a pile of inventory is much higher than they think. Also, it was noticed that one of the bottleneck machines wasn’t even working at that time. Lost time on the bottleneck means that they have lost throughput. A lost hour at a bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system. Because of this, the plant has also been making parts that don’t contribute to the throughput. Jonah also suggests that they use their quality control differently. Instead of inspecting the final product, he suggests moving quality control in front of the bottleneck in order to prevent poor quality p

Some topics in this essay:
Soon Alex, Bill Peach, Overall Alex, Jonah Alex, NCX-10 Alex, Rogo Alex, Peach Alex, Alex Alex’s, , final assembly, batch sizes, plant alex, entire system, inventory operating, quality control, operating expense, throughput inventory, front bottlenecks, alex’s plant, inventory operating expense, poor quality products, piles piles inventory, quality control front, capacity constraint resources,