The Goal

186

The combination of these has allowed us to ship our most critical orders and to ship a few more of them than normal. But I know we're not going fast enough. A few weeks ago we were limping along; now we're walking, but we ought to be jogging.

Glancing back toward the monitor, I see the eyes are upon me.

"Listen... I know we've taken a step in the right direc- tion," I explain. "But we have to accelerate the progress. It's good that we got twelve shipments out last week. But we're still having some customer orders become past due. It's not as many, I'll grant you, but we still have to do better. We really shouldn't have any late orders."

Everyone walks away from the computer and joins me around the table. Bob Donovan starts telling me how they're planning some refinements on what we've already done.

I say, "Bob, those are fine, but they're minor. How are we coming on the other suggestions Jonah made?"

Bob glances away.

"Well... we're looking into them," he says.

I say, "I want recommendations on offloading the bottle- necks ready for our Wednesday staff meeting."

Bob nods, but says nothing.

"You'll have them for us?" I ask.

"Whatever it takes," he says.

That afternoon in my office, I have a meeting with Elroy Langston, our Q.C. manager, and Barbara Penn, who handles employee communications. Barbara writes the newsletters, which are now explaining the background and reasons for the changes taking place in the plant. Last week, we distributed the first issue. I put her together with Langston to have her work on a new project.

After parts exit the bottlenecks, they often tend to look al- most identical to the parts going into the bottlenecks. Only a close examination by a trained eye will detect the difference in some cases. The problem is how to make it easy for the employee to tell the two apart... and to make it possible for the employee to treat the post-bottleneck parts so more of them make it to assem- bly and are shipped as quality products. Langston and Penn are in my office to talk about what they've come up with.

"We already have the red tags," says Penn. "So that tells us