The Goal

209

"But we need them now," I say. "How come they're not being worked on?"

Jake shrugs his shoulders. "You know which ones you want, we'll do 'em right now. But that goes against them rules you set up in that there priority system."

He points to some other skids of materials nearby.

"You see over there?" says Jake. "They all got red tags. We got to do all of 'em before we touch the stuff with green tags. That's what you told us, right?"

Uh- huh. It's becoming clear what's been happening.

"You mean," says Stacey, "that while the materials with green tags have been building up, you've been spending all your time on the parts bound for the bottlenecks."

"Yeah, well, most of it," says Jake. "Hey, like we only got so many hours in a day, you know what I mean?"

"How much of your work is on bottleneck parts?" asks Jo- nah.

"Maybe seventy-five or eighty percent," says Jake. "See, ev- erything that goes to heat-treat or the NCX-10 has to pass through here first. As long as the red parts keep coming-and they haven't let up one bit since that new system started-we just don't have the time to work on very many of the green-tag parts."

There is a moment of silence. I look from the parts to the machines and back to Jake again.

"What the hell do we do now?" asks Donovan in echo to my own thoughts. "Do we switch tags? Make the missing parts red instead of green?"

I throw up my hands in frustration and say, "I guess the only solution is to expedite."

"No, actually, that is not the solution at all," Jonah says, "be- cause if you resort to expediting now, you'll have to expedite all the time, and the situation will only get worse."

"But what else can we do?" asks Stacey.

Jonah says, "First, I want us to go look at the bottlenecks, because there is another aspect to the problem."

Before we can see the NCX-10, we see the inventory. It's stacked as high as the biggest forklift can reach. It's not just a mountain, but a mountain with many peaks. The piles here are even bigger than before we identified the machine as a bottle- neck. And tied to every bin, hanging from every pallet of parts is