Angelina Tambunan
ACCT 508
Book Report ‘The Goal’
I. Summary
The story takes place at a fictitious town called Bearington where the Uniware manufacturing plant of the UniCo Company is situated. Whatever products the plant manufactures was not mentioned in the novel. The plant is headed by the plant manager Alex Rogo who is also the lead character of the novel.
The problems begin when one upset customer approaches Alex’s boss, Bill Peach about a very late order. Actually Alex’s plant has not been profitable for some time and because of that Bill gives an ultimatum to Alex to turn the plant around in 3 months or else the plant will be closed unless there are visible improvements. Due to the limited amount of time given, Alex
…show more content…
Alex decided to meet with Jonah in New York in order to fix their plant problem. But once again, Jonah leaves Alex with another question, what does the combination of "dependent events" and "statistical fluctuations" have to do with your plant?
During the weekend, Alex went to a hiking trip with his son and got stuck as a ‘troop master’. During the hiking, Alex discovers Alex discovers the importance of "dependent events" in relation to "statistical fluctuations". With this discovery, he also found out that the bottleneck’s speed of production is what determines the speed of the other dependents. Hence, inventory moves very slowly because of statistical fluctuations.
Back to the plant, Alex with his team begins their search for their plant’s bottlenecks. Then they found one the machine (NCX-10) and the heat treatment as the source plant’s bottlenecks. Alex invites Jonah to visit his plant in order to solve their bottlenecks problem. Jonah define bottleneck as any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it and a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it. With Jonah’s help, Alex and his team able to solve their bottlenecks problem such as perform the quality control testing before going into the bottleneck, do not produce parts for inventory - produce only what is in demand, produce smaller batches to increase productivity for the whole process, etc. One thing that they also learn from
Given three months to turn the plant around, Alex turns to Jonah, his old college physics professor who has become a manufacturing consultant, and enlists his help. Jonah has a unique and potentially risky approach to addressing the problems at the plant. First, he takes what can be a complicated
I would like to pursue counseling as my career and become a successful leader in the field. I have always had a passion to assist people in emotional distress. As a qualified professional in the counseling field, I would be able to identify their problems as well as offer them the most appropriate solutions that may help them deal with their situations. However, working as a professional counselor requires that I possess the relevant skills and knowledge that would enable me to offer quality services in which I think that I can obtain the skills at Capella University. As a
Some people say that with dedication, persistence, and time people can accomplish any goal. Others say that people are limited in what they can accomplish and need to be realistic when setting goals.
Drawing characters, backgrounds, rims, cars, or trucks spends most of my pastime. In addition to drawing, I would also like to partake classes in Animation. Art directors earned $56,880 in 2000, and the highest 10% made more than $109,440 dollars. Artist work about 40 hours a week, but during busy periods, they work overtime to meet deadlines.
I am a 17-year-old junior at Port Saint Lucie High School. I plan on graduating with high honors and getting scholarships for college. When I graduate, I don’t plan on “taking a break” I plan on enrolling to a four-year college. I want to study in the medical field. I’m planning on majoring in being a nurse, or a registered nurse or a paramedic. My top two choices for colleges are located in Boston Massachusetts which are Northeastern University and Boston University. While being in college I also plan to have a part time job that will help me pay all my expenses.
Alex comes up with the consensus that the “Goal” of his business and many others is to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment and their cash flow at the plant. This basically means to make money. These three measurements can be achieved by looking closer into his second set of measurements. Alex specifically must find a way to increase throughput while at the same time decreasing it inventory and operational expenses. All three of these measurements must be cautiously monitored since they all rely on each other to be obtained in balance. Factors that cause throughput, inventory, and operational expenses to become unbalanced are excess manpower and balance capacity of the demand of resources in the market.
Chapter 03: Alex attended a meeting with Bill Peach along with all other plant managers at headquarter and they discussed their performance which was not satisfactory. The goal was set for the next quarter. Furthermore they also agreed to a deadline of one year to improve productions or there might be some major changes in the company. Alex realized in this meeting, that why his boss Bill Peach was so angry on the other day.
Since Alex’s plant has not been profitable for quite some time, the division president comes in one day and informs Alex that the plant will be closing down within 3 months unless he is able to make significant improvements. Alex does not wish to give up all his hard work for so many years and starts to think about ways to improve the plant and save it from being closed down.
Alex Rogo, plant manager at UniCo, is told that he needs to bring the plant around in three months and make it profitable. Battling between his personal life problems (marriage) and problems at work, Alex just couldn’t seem to make it work initially. He targets all of the wrong factors like employing the right people and assuring he has the latest technology. This is demonstrated clearly when Mr. Bill Peach, division vice president, discusses about a seven week overdue order that needed to be shipped out that very same day. The first foul is seen when Mr. Rogo handled the situation by forcing all the employees to work over time that night. Although that order got shipped out that night, it is not an efficient or stable method to take care of the problem. This is when Jonah, Alex’s old physics professor, comes to the rescue. After Jonah’s and Alex’s
Jonah tells them that they have hidden capacity because some of their thinking is incorrect. Some ways to increase capacity at the bottlenecks are not to have any down time within the bottlenecks, make sure they are only working on quality products so not to waste time, and relieve the workload by farming some work out to vendors. Jonah wants to know how much it cost when the bottlenecks (X and heat treat) machines are down. Lou says $32 per hour for the X machine and $21 per hour for heat treat. How much when the whole
The novel took place at a fictitious town called Bearington where the Uniware manufacturing plant of the UniCo company is
Out of the three goals, (Personal, educational, and professional) I chose two of the goals that I am focusing on and that is my personal and educational goals. For my personal goals, I want to create a big picture of what I plan to do in life. Then I want to break them down in order to reach my goals, then once I have them together, then I would start working on them to achieve them. For example(Specific and Measurable goals), I plan on finding a job that has great benefits and the best rate of pay, and one that does not require working on weekends(Monday-Friday only), and not working overtime.
The book is about a plant manger in a manufacturing company, Alex, who was hired in this position six months ago. His plant was suffered because it was running with neither profitability nor productivity. His boss, Mr. Peach, told Alex that the plant will be shut down in three months unless shows some improvements. Alex then, meets with
The bottlenecks are the areas (machines) in the plant that are constantly holding back the production of the finished product. The philosophy behind this will become clear in a moment.
These two bottlenecks constrained the whole process. Alex and his colleagues were happy to identify two "Hebie"s, NCX-10 and Heat Treatment Department, which bottlenecked a flow sufficient to meet demand and make money. So the only thing to do was to find more capacity. To increase the capacity of the plant was to increase the capacity of only the bottlenecks. To increase the capacity of bottlenecks did not mean to install new machine, but to find the hidden capacity. With the help of Jonah, Alex found the NCX-10 had 1-hour idle time, as the union contract stipulated that there must be a half-hour break after every four hours work. The hours lost in the breaks of NCX-10 were enormously expensive because the throughput for the entire plant had been lowered by the bottleneck. The problem of the second "Hebie", heat treat, was that they didn 't make the bottleneck work on the parts contributed to throughput and many products were unable to be shipped without the parts in pile for treatment. What was more, they only did most inspections prior to final assembly but never inspected the parts before bottleneck. It easily let defects go through bottleneck and lost time in the bottleneck could not be recovered. The cost of one hour lost in these two bottlenecks is the cost of an hour lost in the system, which is computed as the total expense of the system divided by