The Goal

235

So I do. Then, wondering if we've reached some theoretical limit by now, I ask him if there is anything else we can try.

"Anything else?" he says. "Believe me, we have only begun. Now, here's what I suggest..."

Early the next morning, I'm in my office at the plant consid- ering what Jonah told me. Outside is the dawn of the day he's already seen in Singapore. Stepping out to get a cup of coffee, I find Stacey at the coffee machine.

"Hello there," she says. "I hear everything went fairly well for us at headquarters yesterday."

"Well, not bad," I say. "I'm afraid we still have a way to go before we convince Peach we're good for the long term. But I talked to Jonah last night."

"Did you tell him about our progress?" she asks.

"Yes," I say. "And he suggested we try what he called 'the next logical step.''

I see her face take on a nervous grin. "What's that?"

"Cut our batch sizes in half on non-bottlenecks," I say.

Stacy takes a step back as she thinks about this. "But why?" she asks.

I say with a smile, "Because in the end we'll make more money."

"I don't understand," she says. "How is that going to help us?"

"Hey, Stacey, you're in charge of inventory control," I tell her. "You tell me what would happen if we cut our batch sizes in half."

Thinking, she sips her coffee for a moment. Her brow com- presses in concentration. Then she says, "If we cut our batch sizes in half, then I guess that at any one time we'd have half the work- in-process on the floor. I guess that means we'd only need half the investment in work-in-process to keep the plant working. If we could work it out with our vendors, we could conceivably cut all our inventories in half, and by cutting our inventories in half, we reduce the amount of cash tied up at any one time, which eases the pressure on cash flow."

I'm nodding each time she says a sentence, and finally I say, "That's right. That's one set of benefits."

She says, "But to reap those benefits fully, we'd have to have our suppliers increase the frequency of deliveries to us and re- duce the quantity of each delivery. That's going to take some