The Goal

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But I wonder how Jonah knew? He seemed to know right away that productivity hadn't increased. There were those ques- tions he asked.

One of them, I remember as I'm driving, was whether we had been able to sell any more products as a result of having the robots. Another one was whether we had reduced the number of people on the payroll. Then he had wanted to know if inventories had gone down. Three basic questions.

When I get home, Julie's car is gone. She's out some place, which is just as well. She's probably furious at me. And I simply do not have time to explain right now.

After I'm inside, I open my briefcase to make a note of those questions, and I see the list of measurements Jonah gave me last night. From the second I glance at those definitions again, it's obvious. The questions match the measurements.

That's how Jonah knew. He was using the measurements in the crude form of simple questions to see if his hunch about the robots was correct: did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the last, exactly what he said: did our inventories go down?

With that observation, it doesn't take me long to see how to express the goal through Jonah's measurements. I'm still a little puzzled by the way he worded the definitions. But aside from that, it's clear that every company would want to have its throughput go up. Every company would also want the other two, inventory and operational expense, to go down, if at all pos- sible. And certainly it's best if they all occur simultaneously-just as with the trio that Lou and I found.

So the way to express the goal is this?

Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both in- ventory and operating expense.

That means if the robots have made throughput go up and the other two go down, they've made money for the system. But what's really happened since they started working?

I don't know what effect, if any, they've had on throughput. But off the top of my head, I know inventories have generally increased over the past six or seven months, although I can't say for sure if the robots are to blame. The robots have increased our depreciation, because they're new equipment, but they haven't directly taken away any jobs from the plant; we simply shifted