The Goal

196

"Who's going to set up the other machines?" he asks.

"The helpers on the other machines know enough to set up their own equipment," I say.

"Well, I guess we can try it," says Bob. "But what happens if stealing people turns non-bottlenecks into bottlenecks?"

I tell him, "The important thing is to maintain the flow. If we take a worker away, and we can't maintain the flow, then we'll put the worker back and steal a body from someplace else. And if we still can't keep the flow going, then we'll have no choice but to go to a division and insist that we either go to overtime or call a few people back from layoff."

"Okay," says Bob. "I'll go for it."

Lou gives us his blessing.

"Good. Let's do it," I say. "And, Bob, make sure the people you pick are good. From now on, we put only our best people to work on the bottlenecks."

And so it is done.

The NCX- 10 gets a dedicated setup crew. The Zmegma and the other machines go to work. The outfit across town is only too glad to take our surplus parts for heat-treating. And in our own heat-treat department, two people per shift are assigned to stand by, ready to load and unload parts from the furnaces. Donovan juggles the work-center responsibilities so heat-treat has a fore-man there at all times.

For a foreman, heat-treat seems like a very small kingdom, not much of a prize. There is nothing intrinsically attractive about running that operation, and having only two people to manage makes it seem like no big deal. To prevent it from seeming like a demotion to them, I make a point to go down there periodically on each of the shifts. In talking to the foreman, I drop some rather direct hints that the rewards will be great for anyone who can improve the output of heat-treated parts.

Shortly thereafter, some amazing things happen. Very early one morning, I'm down there at the end of third shift. A young guy named Mike Haley is the foreman. He's a big black man whose arms always look as though they're going to burst the sleeves on his shirts. We've noticed that over the past week he's pushed about ten percent more parts through heat-treat on his shift than the others have. Records are not usually set on third shift, and we're starting to wonder if it's Mike's biceps that are