The Goal

184

"Shall we go?" suggests Julie.

Joking, I tell Julie's mother, "I'll have her home by ten o'clock."

"Good," says Mrs. Barnett. "We'll be waiting."

"There you have it," says Ralph.

"Not bad," says Stacey.

"Not bad? It's a lot better than not bad," says Bob.

"We must be doing something right," says Stacey.

"Yeah, but it isn't enough," I mutter.

A week has passed. We're grouped around a computer ter- minal in the conference room. Ralph has extracted from the com- puter a list of overdue orders that we shipped last week.

"Isn't enough? At least it's progress," says Stacey. "We shipped twelve orders last week. For this plant, that's not bad. And they were our twelve most overdue orders."

"By the way, our worst overdue order is now only forty four days late," says Ralph. "As you may recall, the worst one used to be fifty eight days."

"All right!" says Donovan.

I step back to the table and sit down.

Their enthusiasm is somewhat justified. The new system of tagging all the batches according to priority and routing has been working fairly well. The bottlenecks are getting their parts promptly. In fact, the piles of inventory in front of them have grown. Following bottleneck processing, the red-tagged parts have been getting to final assembly faster. It's as if we've created an "express lane" through the plant for bottleneck parts.

After putting Q.C. in front of the bottlenecks, we discovered that about five percent of the parts going into the NCX-10 and about seven percent going into heat-treat did not conform to quality requirements. If those percentages hold true in the fu- ture, we'll effectively have gained that time for additional throughput.

The new policy of having people cover the bottlenecks on lunch breaks has also gone into effect. We're not sure how much we've gained from that, because we didn't know how much we were losing before. At least we're doing the right thing now. But I have heard reports that from time to time the NCX-10 is idle- and it happens when there is nobody on break. Donovan is sup- posed to be looking into the causes.