The Goal

180

It turns out, as Bob explains to me, that the parts they were waiting for at the NCX-10 have been sitting there for about a week. Otto has been running other batches of parts. He didn't know about the importance of the parts destined for the NCX-10. To him they looked like any other batch-and a rather unimpor- tant one judging from the size. When Bob got here, they were in the middle of a big, long run. Otto didn't want to stop... until Donovan explained it to him, that is.

"Dammit, Al, it's just like before," Bob says. "They get set up and they start running one thing, and then they have to break in the middle so we can finish something else. It's the same damn thing!"

"Now hold on," I say. "Let's think about this for a second." Bob shakes his head. "What is there to think about?" "Let's just try to reason this through," I say. "What was the problem?"

"The parts didn't arrive at the NCX-10, which meant the operators couldn't run the batch they were supposed to be run- ning," says Bob in kind of a sing-song way.

"And the cause was that the bottleneck parts were held up by this non-bottleneck machine running non-bottleneck parts," I say. "Now we've got to ask ourselves why that happened."

"The guy in charge here was just trying to stay busy, that's all," says Bob.

"Right. Because if he didn't stay busy, someone like you would come along and jump all over him," I say.

"Yeah, and if I didn't, then someone like you would jump all over me," says Bob.

"Okay, granted. But even though this guy was busy, he wasn't helping to move toward the goal," I say.

"Well..."

"He wasn't, Bob! Look," I say. I point to the parts destined for the NCX-10. "We need those parts now, not tomorrow. The non-bottleneck parts we may not need for weeks, or even months -maybe never. So by continuing to run the non-bottleneck parts, this guy was actually interfering with our ability to get an order out the door and make money."

"But he didn't know any better," says Bob.

"Exactly. He couldn't distinguish between an important batch of parts and an unimportant one," I say. "Why not?"

"Nobody told him."