The Goal

The Goal is the most interesting novel that I have read in a long time. It identifies a number of concepts for the industrial engineering field. The novel gives industrial engineers a very important aspect of the manufacturing production. After reading this book I cannot wait to graduate from college with an industrial engineering degree, because this book made me very interested in my major.

The main reason Bill Peach almost shutdown Alex Rogo's plant, in the novel The Goal, is that Rogo had never identified his constraints. Rogo never understood the Theory of Constraints until he talked to his old physics professor Jonah. Jonah mainly tells Rogo that he had a machine or a multiple number machines in your factory that can only produce a certain amount of a product. Jonah tells Rogo that those are what are called bottlenecks. Jonah tells him that you must identify these machines and figure out how much they can produce in a day. He also tells him that if he want to increase his production then he will have to keep your down time on these machines to a minimum, while keeping the product that can be produced in this machine to a maximum. Alex finds the bottlenecks in his plant simply by going to each machine, and whichever one had the most inventory in front of it is a bottleneck, because it cannot process them as quickly.

Rogo finds that the NCX-10 and the furnace are the two main bottlenecks in his plant. Rogo discovers that while the NCX-10 is idling, the operators are performing other task elsewhere in the plant. Rogo notices that is a major lost of time on the bottlenecks. Rogo tells the operators not to leave their machines to do other tasks in the plant, because operating the NCX-10 is their only job. Rogo also tells the NCX-10 operators that they cannot go on break unless the machine is operating. The union people say that they cannot do it because that violates the union rules. Rogo tells them you can make this happen, or be out of a job when the plant shutdown in three months. The union heads allows Rogo to let the NCX-10 be operating while the operator went on break, instead of being out of service.

The furnace will have major down time because it will take four hours to complete a heat treatment, but it might be done for two or three hours before the operators have time to quit the job they are doing to empty the furnace and reload it. Rogo decides to solve this problem by telling the operator that his entire job is to worry about is load and unloading the furnace when it is complete. Rogo did not care if it meant the operator stood around for four hours with nothing to do, as long as they were there to unload the furnace when it is complete. The reason for that is because even despite the fact they are paying the operator to do nothing, they are still saving major amount of money. They can produce the product faster by unload and loading the furnace when it is finished, instead of letting the furnace idle for two hours. Secondly, they will not completely load the furnace because they will not have enough parts for the certain temperature they have to run them through at. The night furnace operator, Mike Haley, figured out that he can fill up the furnace with part that are not need for that specific order but use the same degree temperature cycle. This is like killing two birds with one stone, you just cut four-hours out of your furnace time for an order that will be processed later. After improving these small amounts of step, the plant has its best month ever.

The part that I liked most in this novel is when Rogo would get off the phone with Jonah, and Jonah does not tell him the direct answer to the problem he asked him about. Rogo did not like when Jonah did this to him, but he is try to keep asking Jonah question but Jonah tells him he had to go. Jonah just wants to give Rogo some basic pointer on how to improve his plant process. He wants Rogo to figure out himself what exactly to do, so he will learn what the problem was. If Jonah tells him the answer word for word then he will never learn why there was such a problem in the first place. In the future, Rogo will know what to do when a similar problem came up and how to fix it himself instead of calling Jonah to give him the answer again. At the end of the novel, everyone on Rogo's team will be in the conference room trying to figure out when the problem of the plant are still

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