The Goal

176

She says, "Well... I guess not."

"Good. What are you doing Saturday night?" I ask.

There is a moment of silence as the smile forms on her face.

Amused, she asks, "Are you asking me for a date?"

"Yes, I am."

Long pause.

I say, "So would you like to go out with me?"

"Yes, I'd like that a lot," she says finally.

"Great. How about I see you at 7:30?"

"I'll be ready," she says.

The next morning in the conference room, we've got the two supervisors of the bottlenecks with us. By "us," I mean Stacey, Bob, Ralph and me. Ted Spencer is the supervisor responsible for the heat-treat furnaces. He's an older guy with hair that looks like steel wool and a body like a steel file. We've got him and Mario DeMonte, supervisor of the machining center with the NCX-10. Mario is as old as Ted, but plumper.

Stacey and Ralph both have red eyes. Before we sat down, they told me about the work that went into this morning's meet- ing.

Getting the list of overdue orders was easy. The computer listed them and sorted them according to lateness. Nothing to it, didn't even take a minute. But then they had to go over the bills of material for each of the orders and find out which parts are done by the bottlenecks. And they had to establish whether there was inventory to make those parts. That took most of the night.

We all have our own photocopies of a hand-written list Ralph has had prepared. Listed in the print-out is a grand total of sixty seven records, our total backlog of overdue orders. They have been sorted from most-days-past-due to least-days. The worst one, at the top of the list, is an order that is fifty eight days beyond the delivery date promised by marketing. The best are one day late; there are three of those orders.

"We did some checking," says Ralph. "And about ninety per- cent of the current overdues have parts that flow through one or both of the bottleneck operations. Of those, about eighty five per- cent are held up at assembly because we're waiting for those parts to arrive before we can build and ship."