The Goal

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doing the trick. Anyway, I go down there to try to learn what he's doing.

As I walk up, I see the two helpers are not just standing around with nothing to do. They're moving parts. In front of the furnaces are two tightly organized stacks of work-in-process, which the helpers are building. I call Mike over and ask him what they're doing.

"They're getting ready," he says. "What do you mean?"

"They're getting ready for when we have to load one of the furnaces again," he says. "The parts in each stack are all treated at the same temperature."

"So you're splitting and overlapping some batches," I say. "Sure," he says. "I know we're not really supposed to do that, but you need the parts, right?"

"Sure, no problem. You're still doing the treating according to the priority system?" I ask.

"Oh, yeah," he says. "Come here. Let me show you." Mike leads me past the control console for the furnaces to a worn old battleship of a desk. He finds the computer print-out for the week's most important overdue orders.

"See, look at number 22," he says pointing to it. "We need fifty of the high stress RB-dash-11's. They get treated at a 1200- degree temperature cycle. But fifty of them won't fill up the fur- nace. So we look down and what do we see here but item number 31, which calls for 300 fitted retaining rings. Those also take a 1200-degree cycle."

"So you'll fill up the furnace with as many of the retaining rings after you've loaded the fifty of the first item," I say.

"Yeah, that's it," says Mike. "Only we do the sorting and stacking in advance so we can load the furnace faster." "That's good thinking," I tell him.

"Well, we could do even better if I could get someone to listen to an idea I got," he says. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well, right now, it takes anywhere up to an hour or so to change a furnace load using the crane or doing it by hand. We could cut that down to a couple of minutes if we had a better system." He points to the furnaces. "Each one of those has a table which the parts sit on. They slide in and out on rollers. If we could get some steel plate and maybe a little help from engineer-