Goal

The Goal Book Report

1. What are the methods described in The Goal for identifying a bottleneck?

Alex uses the example of the slow kid he encountered during the weekend trip to formulate his strategy to identify the bottleneck in his plant. The concept of cost centres was applied to understand which resource had lesser capacity than the demand. Mr Bob came up with the idea of scouting through the plant to identify the bottleneck and he identified NCX-10 and the heat-treat department.

2. After bottlenecks have been identified, what are the concrete factory floor-level actions described in the book for improving overall system performance?

The first change was to make the bottlenecks operational during breaks taken by the operators. The second change was to implement quality checks ta the bottlenecks so that those machine didn’t waste time working on defective part. Another measure was to shift units which didn’t need treatment from bottleneck machines to another non-bottleneck machines.

3. Relate the notions of statistical fluctuations and dependent events mentioned in the book to concepts covered during the course. Also explain and relate to course concepts the statement made by Jonah that a factory "balanced with demand" will soon experience bankruptcy.

The concept of statistical fluctuations and dependent events related to line balancing problems where we are supposed to identify and arrange machines into workstations in a particular sequence so as to reduce the overall cycle time. He we arrange the workstations such that each one is depended on its predecessor. Also each workstation may have fluctuations from the calculated workstation cycle time, but overall it averages out.

4. Several times in the book, lot sizes are reduced in order to decrease cycle time. What are the limits to this strategy?

The first problem is increased frequency of purchase orders, thus the number of setups will increase adding to cost and setup time. The second...