The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt examines the life of an American plant manger in his

quest to find out what exactly the goal of a plant manager is and how to go about

reaching

this goal. Along the way towards realizing the goal, the plant manager is forced define

and understand the theory of constraints. It is important to understand the theory of

constraints for the manager to be able to identify what restrictions are being opposed

onto

his various operations and to know how to reverse their affects. In this particular case

it

takes the manager having to continually deal with orders being finished late and

therefore

unsatisfied customers and an irate employer in order to realize that serious problems

are

occurring within his plant.Once the goal, which inevitably turns out to be money, is

found, it is imperative to figure out how to express the goal in the form of a

measurement.

Three measurements are able to not only express the goal of making money, but also

make it possible for the manager to develop operational rules for running his plant.

These

measurements are: throughput, inventory, and operational expense, and everything that

the manager manages in his plant is covered by them. Still, the manager must do much

thinking and research in order to figure out just how to express his goal in terms of

these

measurement.In addition to expressing the goal, the manager is troubled by whether

employees, robots, and machinery actuall need to be running at all times. At first

glance

many managers seem to think that an idle worker is an unproductive worker, but Goldratt

shows us that in reality a plant in which everyone is working all the time is very

inefficient. The manager in the book soon comes to realize that machines don't run

themselves -- it takes people to create excess inventory, so sometimes when a worker is

taking a break, thereby leaving a machine idle, it's actually a good thing.One huge

problem that often arises in a plant such as the one Goldratt has lead us through is

distinguishing between two resources. One is the bottleneck which is when many

operations are feeding their output into one operation whose capacity is less than the

combined capacities of the operations that provide input, leaving units to queue up

while

waiting to be processed. If bottlenecks can be improved then productivity will increase

until the output rate of the bottleneck is equal to that of the output rate of the

operations

feeding it. The second resource is the non-bottleneck which is any resource whose

capacity is greater than the demand placed on it. In the Goal it can be seen that the

main

problem for the plant manager is the bottleneck and how to make the flow through the

bottleneck only slightly less than demand.First and foremost, every manager and future

manager should definitely

sit down and read this book. Even if it does not of

characteristics of a particular plant, the basic concepts that The Goal discusses can be

of

help to nearly every manager of any kind of business. Learning to deal with such things

has bottlenecks, excess inventories, and the theory of constraints is something that