The Goal

151

dollars more with somebody else," says Bob. "And we can't seem to attract anybody good with the wages we offer."

"Well why don't we pay more for people on this equipment?"

"The union," says Bob. "We'd get complaints, and the union would want us to up the pay-grade for all the setup people."

I take a last look.

"Okay, so much for this," I say.

But that isn't all. The two of us walk to the other side of the plant where Bob gives me a second introduction.

"Meet Herbie Number Two: the heat-treat department," says Bob.

This one looks more like what you might think of in terms of an industrial Herbie. It's dirty. It's hot. It's ugly. It's dull. And it's indispensable.

Heat- treat basically is a pair of furnaces... a couple of grimy, dingy, steel boxes, the insides of which are lined with ce-ramic blocks. Gas burners raise the internal temperatures to the 1500-degree-Fahrenheit range.

Certain parts, after they've been machined or cold-worked or whatever at ordinary temperatures, can't be worked on any- more until they've been treated with heat for an extended period of time. Most often, we need to soften the metal, which becomes very hard and brittle during processing, so it can have more machining done to it.

So the furnace operators put in the parts, from a dozen or less to a couple of hundred, then they fire up the thing and cook the parts in there for a long time-anywhere from six hours to sixteen hours. And afterwards, the parts always have to go through a further cool-down to air temperature outside the fur- nace. We lose a lot of time on this process.

"What's the problem here-we need bigger furnaces?" I ask.

Bob says, "Well... yes and no. Most of the time these fur- naces are running half empty."

"How come?"

"It's the expediters who seem to cause the problem," he says. "They're always running over here and having us run five of this part or a dozen of that part just so they can have enough to assemble a shipment. So we end up having fifty parts wait while we heat-treat a handful. I mean, this operation is run like a bar- bershop-take a number and stand in line."

"So we're not running full batches."