The Goal

248

"Well, I don't know. I'd like that business back again, too, but..."

"The real kick in the head is if we had only had the foresight to build a finished goods inventory of Model 12's while we had those slow sales months, we could have made this sale," he says.

I have to smile to myself, because at the beginning of the year I might have agreed with that.

"It's too bad," Johnny is saying. "Aside from the initial busi- ness, it could have been a big opportunity for us."

"How big?"

"Strong hints have been dropped that if we can come through on this one, we could become their preferred supplier," says Jons.

I'm quiet for a moment.

"All right. You really want this, don't you?" I ask him.

"So bad I can taste it," he says. "But if it's impossible..."

"When do you have to let them know?" I ask.

"Probably sometime today, or tomorrow at the latest," he says. "Why? Do you think we can really do it?"

"Maybe there's a way. Let me see how we stand and I'll give you a call back," I tell him.

As soon as I get off the phone with Jons, I round up Bob, Stacey, and Ralph for a meeting in my office, and when we're all together I tell him what Jons told me.

"Ordinarily, I would think this is out of the question," I say. "But before we say no, let's think about it."

Everybody looks at me with the certain knowledge this is going to be a waste of time.

I say, "Let's just see what we can do, okay?"

For the rest of the morning, we're busy with this. We go over the bill of material. Stacey checks on raw materials inventories. Ralph does a quick estimate of how long it will take to produce a thousand units after the materials are on hand. By eleven o'clock, he has calculated that the bottlenecks can turn out parts for the Model 12 at the rate of about one-hundred per day.

"So, yes, it would be technically feasible for us to take the order," says Ralph. "But that's only if we work on nothing else for two weeks except the thousand units for Burnside."

"No, I don't want to do that," I tell him, thinking about us