The Goal

75

end of the third quarter," she says . "And you can't blame me for it-even though everyone always does-because I fought it every step of the way."

"What do you mean?"

"You remember, don't you? Or maybe you weren't here then. But when the reports came in, we found the robots in weld- ing were only running at something like thirty percent efficiency. And the other robots weren't much better. Nobody would stand for that."

I look over at Lou.

"We had to do something," he says. "Frost would have had my head if I hadn't spoken up. Those things were brand new and very expensive. They'd never pay for themselves in the projected time if we kept them at thirty percent."

"Okay, hold on a minute," I tell him. I turn back to Stacey. "What did you do then?"

She says, "What could I do? I had to release more materials to the floor in all the areas feeding the robots. Giving the robots more to produce increased their efficiencies. But ever since then, we've been ending each month with a surplus of those parts."

"But the important thing was that efficiencies did go up," says Lou, trying to add a bright note. "Nobody can find fault with us on that."

"I'm not sure of that at all any more," I say. "Stacey, why are we getting that surplus? How come we aren't consuming those parts?"

"Well, in a lot of cases, we don't have any orders to fill at present which would call for those parts," she says. "And in the cases where we do have orders, we just can't seem to get enough of the other parts we need."

"How come?"

"You'd have to ask Bob Donovan about that," Stacey says.

"Lou, let's have Bob paged," I say.

Bob comes into the office with a smear of grease on his white shirt over the bulge of his beer gut, and he's talking nonstop about what's going on with the breakdown of the automatic test- ing machines.

"Bob," I tell him, "forget about that for now."

"Something else wrong?" he asks.