The Goal

192

"So tell me what you did to light Ted Spencer's fuse," I say to him.

Ralph rolls his eyes and says, "All I wanted from him was to keep an accurate record of the actual times for each heat of parts in the furnace. I thought it was a simple enough request."

"What prompted you to ask him?"

"I had a couple of reasons," says Ralph. "One of them is that the data we have on heat-treat seems to be very inaccurate. And if what you say is true, that this operation is so vital to the plant, then it seems to me we ought to have valid statistics on it."

"What makes you think our data is so inaccurate?" I ask.

"Because after I saw the total on last week's shipments I was kind of bothered by something. A few days ago on my own, I did some projections of how many shipments we would actually be able to make last week based on the output of parts from the bottlenecks. According to those projections, we should have been able to do about eighteen to twenty shipments instead of twelve. The projections were so far off that I figured at first I must have made a big mistake. So I took a closer look, double-checked my math and couldn't find anything wrong. Then I saw that the estimates for the NCX-10 were within the ballpark. But for heat- treat, there was a big difference."

"And that's what made you think that the data base must be in error," I say.

"Right," he says. "So I went down to talk to Spencer. And, ah..."

"And what?"

"Well, I noticed some funny things were happening," he says. "He was kind of tight-lipped when I started asking him questions. Finally, I just happened to ask him when the parts that were being treated in the furnace at the moment were going to be finished. I thought I'd get a time on an actual heat by myself, just to see if we were close to the standard. He said the parts could come out at around 3 P.M. So I went away, and came back at three. But nobody was around. I waited for about ten minutes, then went to look for Ted. When I found him, he said he had the furnace helpers working somewhere else and they'd get around to unloading the furnace in a little while. I didn't think much about it. Then around 5:30, as I was leaving for the day, I de- cided I'd go by the furnace to ask what time the parts had actually come out. But the same parts were still in there."