The Goal

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ket demand placed on it. To find out if we've got one then, we concluded we first would have to know the total market demand for products coming out of this plant. And, second, we would have to find out how much time each resource has to contribute toward filling the demand. If the number of available hours for production (discounting maintenance time for machines, lunch and breaks for people, and so on) for the resource is equal to or less than the hours demanded, then we know we've found our Herbie.

Getting a fix on the total market demand is a matter of pull- ing together data which we have on hand anyway-the existing backlog of customer orders, and the forecast for new product and spare parts. It's the complete product mix for the entire plant, including what we "sell" to other plants and divisions in the com- pany.

Having done that, we're now in the process of calculating the hours each "work center" has to contribute. We're defining a work center as any group of the same resources. Ten welders with the same skills constitute a work center. Four identical machines constitute another. The four machinists who set up and run the machines are still another, and so on. Dividing the total of work center hours needed, by the number of resources in it, gives us the relative effort per resource, a standard we can use for com- parison.

Yesterday, for instance, we found the demand for injection molding machines is about 260 hours a month for all the injec- tion molded parts that they have to process. The available time for those machines is about 280 hours per month, per resource. So that means we still have reserve capacity on those machines.

But the more we get into this, the more we're finding that the accuracy of our data is less than perfect. We're coming up with bills of material that don't match the routings, routings that don't have the current run-times-or the correct machines, as we just found out-and so on.

"The problem is, we've been under the gun so much that a lot of the updating has just fallen by the wayside," says Stacey.

"Hell, with engineering changes, shifting labor around, and all that happening all the time, it's just plain tough to keep up with it no matter what," says Bob.

Ralph shakes his head. "To double-check and update every piece of data relevant to this plant could take months!"