The Goal

152

"Yeah, sometimes we are. But sometimes even if we do a full batch in number, it's not enough to fill the furnace."

"The batches are too small?"

"Or too big in size, and we have to run a second heat to handle the pieces that wouldn't fit in the first. It just never seems to work out," says Bob. "You know, a couple of years ago, there was a proposal to add a third furnace, on account of the prob- lems."

"What happened to it?"

"It was killed at the division level. They wouldn't authorize the funds because of low efficiencies. They told us to use the capacity we've got. Then maybe they'd talk expansion. Besides, there was all kinds of noise about how we've got to save energy and how another furnace would burn twice as much fuel and all that."

"Okay, but if we filled the furnace every time, would we have enough capacity to meet demand?" I ask.

Bob laughs.

"I don't know. We've never done it that way before."

Once upon a time, I had an idea for doing to the plant essen- tially what I did with the boys on the hike. I thought the best thing to do would be to reorganize everything so the resource with the least capacity would be first in the routings. All other resources would have gradual increases in capacity to make up for the statistical fluctuations passed on through dependency.

Well, the staff and I meet right after Bob and I get back to the office, and it's pretty obvious, awfully damn quick, that my grand plan for the perfect un balanced plant with Herbie in front is just not going to fly.

"From a production standpoint, we can't do it," says Stacey.

"There is just no way we can move even one Herbie-let alone two-to the front of production," Bob says. "The sequence of operations has to stay the way it is. There's nothing we can do about it."

"Okay, I already can see that," I say.

"We're stuck with a set of dependent events," says Lou.

As I listen to them, I get that old familiar feeling which j anes whenever a lot of work and energy are about to go down the tubes. It's kind of like watching a tire go flat.

I say, "Okay, if we can't do anything to change their position