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The Struggle In Alex Rogo's The Goal

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Alex Rogo, the main protagonist of “The Goal”, is a plant manager faced with a dire situation; stop his factory’s downward spiral and bring it back to profitability within three months or be shut down. He is frustrated, scared, and clueless as to how to proceed. Alex knows his productivity numbers are all within the acceptable limits his company, UniCo, has determined, yet the plant is still losing money, amassing a great deal of inventory, and failing to meet delivery deadlines promised to customers. On top of all this his personal life is beginning to crumble. His wife, Julie is lonely and unhappy. Alex spends all his time trying to fix issues at the plant and is increasingly absent at home. The outlook is grim. A chance meeting at …show more content…

Gaps form in the single file line due to the differing speeds of the hikers. He realizes that instead of averaging, the fluctuations accumulate and the higher fluctuations are limited due to one hiker’s dependency on the speed of the person in front of him. Alex then has the scouts play a dice rolling game to simulate the effects of the two phenomena on an assembly line. On the way back Alex attempts to fix the gaps in the line. He orders the boys with the slowest in front to keep everyone together and offloads weight from the lead hiker and distributes it among the …show more content…

They move quality control to inspect items going into the NCX-10 and heat treat and reorganize the way breaks are taken and place a foreman at each bottleneck so that the machines will always be in operation. They also label high priority items with a red sticker and low priority items with a green sticker. Bob finds some old machines to supplement what the NCX-10 does, thus reducing its workload. A foreman at the heat treat figures out a way to fully load the heat treat for each cycle and suggests changing the way they remove parts to something much faster. EFFECT OF ACTIONS: Their throughput increases; slowly at first but with each successive improvement it increases ever faster. They break monthly shipping records by large margins and reduce work-in-progress inventories by 12%. Everything appears to be going well until parts start accumulating at non-bottleneck machines and red-tagged parts are arriving at final assembly while the green-tagged parts needed to complete the product are stuck in the process at a non-bottleneck

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