The Goal By Eliyahu M. Veldt

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is about a plant manager named Alex Rogo and his quest of knowledge to make his company profitable again. Alex does this while battling family issues at home with his wife. In the beginning, Alex has no idea where he is going to start or even understand why they are losing money. Everything that he reads according to the numbers of the company says that he is running a very efficient company.

The company started off producing 20,000 units of mountain bikes. We did not change the production quantity. Last year our forecast sales were 24,000 when we only sold 19,866; therefore we thought it would be best to leave production at 20,000 bikes. Having excess inventory, we concluded that 20,000 units should be enough considering our quality has not changed and our advertising will not increase the sales dramatically. Although we had the choice to produce as much as 30,000 units, we felt as though we did not have sufficient money to increase production. We were interested in allocating the money towards marketing as opposed to production. We realized that without awareness, no matter how many units we make, sales would be inefficient.

Overhead costs need to be accounted for this way we can understand just how much cost goes into producing each unit. There are other cost factors that contribute to the product aside from labor and material. Since the projected and the actual sales volumes do not align Kelly should be concerned with the other

The main character in “The Goal”, Alex Rogo, manages a production plant that is unprofitable and not efficient with its resources. Alex is given a short amount of time to turn the operations at the plant around and make it an efficient, successful production plant. Throughout the book, Alex Rogo speaks to Jonah a number of times and learns a great amount of information from him. The first significant time that Alex and Jonah spoke was during their chance meeting at an airport lounge. During this conversation, Alex learned a great deal about productivity and goal setting. Jonah explains to Alex that a company has one goal and that the manager must be open about the goal. Jonah then discusses the definition of productivity with Alex and tells him that the true definition is bringing a company closer to its goal that it has set. Among these concepts that Alex learned, he also learned more about his own management style and how it could be improved. Alex learned that he must question common concepts regarding managing and that he must think differently in order to be successful.

In order to be productive all members of staff should be aware of the goals of the firm. Knowing the goals allows the manager to make effective decisions. The goals of the firm can be viewed as the motives of the entrepreneur’s who own and run the firm. There a number of goals that a firm can pursue in its day-to-day

Chapter 01: The first chapter introduced key characters of the story, Alex Rogo, the plant manager of UniCo. And Bill Peach, vice president of the company. Bill was Alex’s boss and was very repugnant about an overdue order #41427. Bill ordered to ship this product within the same day and Alex was also admonished by Bill in regards of this long due order. The company was not making money and due to bad cash flow, Alex was given a survival deadline, which was three months to show any improvement. Otherwise the plant will face a complete shutdown.

Alex stumbles upon his old professor Jonah, who introduced him to the theory of constraint. Jonah states three essential tools of measurement for everything in the plant "Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales."; "Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell"; and "Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput" (Goldratt & Cox, 1984, pp. 60-61). These new ideas create a puzzle for Alex: What is the goal of Unico manufacturing plant? He keeps wandering and drifting his thought about what the goal of his plant is. After food and beer, it strikes Alex that the ultimate goal is to make money (Goldratt & Cox, 1984, p. 41). In order to make more money for the plant there should be an increase in throughput and a decrease in inventory as well

But then again, the goal isn't clear to everyone. One of the characters in the book, an accountant, responds to an offhand comment about the goal with a confused "The goal? You mean our objectives for the month?" That's sure to strike a chord with a lot of readers.

Operating expenses includes production costs, such as direct labor, indirect labor, inventory carrying costs, equipment depreciation, materials and supplies used in production, and administrative cost. This was not happening at Alex’s plant. His inventories had increased over the past six or seven months and operational expense also increased. This meant he had a lot of work to do to keep his plant open and he was now aware of it.

“The Goal” is a book written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox in 1984. The book is very famous in the management field. In 2004, the author published the third revision of it and celebrated selling over than three million copied of it around the world. Also, the goal book is taught in over than 120 collages. The book was recommended by my professor to be read and summarize as an extra credit.

A second goal is GM’s ambition to raise its profit margin to 10% over the next several years. This goal is quite unattainable since there are no specifics, measurability, nor target

Book Review of "Goal" 1. What is the problem? Alex Rogo was a plant manager at the Barrington Plant of Uniware, a division of UniCo. One day Bill Peach, division vice president visited his plant and found that there were lots of problems with schedule arrangement, quality, cost & inventory control in his plant. These problems had already made the organization lose money. At last Bill gave Alex three months to improve, otherwise, the plant would be closed. Three months?! That was all Alex Rogo was able to think about. Alex had to start to consider what was the goal of the manufacturing organization. What on earth was the GOAL of the manufacturing organization? Was it better customer service? Larger market share? Lower cost? High quality?

I read the fictional book called, The goal: A process of ongoing improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff cox. Goldratt has an extensive history of writing novels about business problems and their solutions. His list of work includes; The race, The haystack syndrome, What is This Thing Called Theory of Constraints and How Should it be Implemented?, It’s not luck, critical chain, and necessary but not sufficient. With his most recent work being in 2009 called Isn’t it obvious focusing on retail. The authors purpose for writing this book would be to educate and show examples on how to think outside the box or solve solutions, possibly even save companies. In his own words, “This book is an attempt to show that we can postulate a very small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a very large spectrum of industrial phenomena” (Goldratt, Intro to revised edition page 2). He states he wants to show that these methods aren’t fantasy and have been/are working in pants around the world, and says that, “Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see” (Goldratt, Introduction page 2). This story is about a failing or close to failing manufacturing plant in a place called Bearington. The novel begins with the main character Alex Rogo, a

To be able to understand the goal of your company you have to be able to understand the overall goal in relation to the measurements, meaning that the rate at which the system generates sales increases while at the same time decreasing the money that the company has used to purchase things and also decreasing the amount of money that is spent moving “inventory” into the throughput. The interesting part of these measurements is that they all have to do with the goal of the company, meaning that they all involve money, which is the overall goal of the company, to make money.

As I seek to enter the workforce/company, one of the first things that I wish to remember is the importance the company has placed on their strategic planning and goals. How decisions made by this team will directly affect the operations, finance, accounting, purchasing and administrative departments. The things that help to make any organization successful, are the value the organization places on their strategic, and operational goals. Therefore, before taking a position with a company I hope to learn as much as I can about the various functions of the company, and how each department works with the next in order to achieve these goals. Thus, I hope to use the knowledge I have gained in this class in operations management to access the company’s operational strategies. This should be reflective in their mission and vision statements as well as their financial reports. I would also look for the value they place on ethics, corporate responsibility and giving back to the community. I feel a company’s success will be directly tied to how effective they are in meeting the daily challenges of processes/production/service, operations, and sales. The value placed on these specific areas will be evident by their success and reflective in both their short and long term goals, in their financial statements.