The Goal

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the part is on a bottleneck routing. What we need is a simple way to show people the parts they need to treat with special attention -the ones they need to treat like gold."

"That's a suitable comparison," I tell her.

She says, "So what if we simply mark the tags with pieces of yellow tape after the parts are finished by the bottlenecks. The tape would tell people on sight that these are the parts you treat like gold. In conjunction with this, I'll do an internal promotion to spread the word about what the tape means. For media, we might use some sort of bulletin board poster, an announcement that the foremen would read to the hourly people, maybe a ban- ner which would hang in the plant-those kinds of things."

"As long as the tape can be added without slowing down the bottlenecks, that sounds fine," I say.

"I'm sure we can find a way to do it so it doesn't interfere," says Langston.

"Good," I say. "One other concern of mine is that I don't want this to be just a lot of promotion."

"That's perfectly understood," says Langston with a smile. "Right now, we're systematically identifying the causes of quality problems on the bottlenecks and in subsequent processing. Once we know where to aim, we'll be having specific procedures devel- oped for bottleneck-routed parts and processes. And once they're established, we'll set up training sessions so people can learn those procedures. But that's obviously going to take some time. For the short term, we're specifying that the existing procedures be double-checked for accuracy on the bottleneck routes."

We talk that over for a few minutes, but basically all of it seems sound to me. I tell them to proceed full speed and to keep me informed of what's happening.

"Nice job," I say to both of them as they stand up to leave. "By the way, Roy, I thought Bob Donovan was going to sit in on this meeting."

"That man is hard to catch these days," says Langston. "But I'll brief him on what we talked about."

Just then, the phone rings. Reaching with one hand to an- swer it, I wave to Langston and Penn with the other as they walk out the door.

"Hi, this is Donovan."

"It's too late to call in sick," I tell him. "Don't you know you just missed a meeting?"