Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes
Open-minded people will not necessarily agree with me, not when my arguments don't make sense to them. But open-minded people do listen, and if I explain and when it is important, they are willing to invest in reevaluating their cause-and-effect connections.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Quotes to Explore
Just remember we are always talking about the organization as a whole—not about the manufacturing department, or about one plant, or about one department within the plant. We are not concerned with local optimums.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Five Focusing Steps 1. IDENTIFY the system’s constraint. 2. Decide how to EXPLOIT the system’s constraint. 3. SUBORDINATE everything else to the above decisions. 4. ELEVATE the system’s constraint. 5. If in the previous steps a constraint has been broken Go back to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system constraint.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Make the bottlenecks work only on what will contribute to throughput today … not nine months from now. That’s one way to increase capacity at the bottlenecks. The other way you increase bottleneck capacity is to take some of the load off the bottlenecks and give it to non-bottlenecks.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
If we cut our batch sizes in half, then I guess that at any one time we’d have half the work-in-process on the floor. I guess that means we’d only need half the investment in work-in-process to keep the plant working. If we could work it out with our vendors, we could conceivably cut all our inventories in half, and by cutting our inventories in half, we reduce the amount of cash tied up at any one time, which eases the pressure on cash flow.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Look, we give sales a rigid lead time for each product. So if it’s not in finished goods, those are the numbers they should use to promise to clients. Yeah, they deviate from it, but not by much. Maybe there should be another way. Maybe the quoted lead times should be done case by case, according to the load on the bottlenecks. And maybe we shouldn’t regard the quantities required as if we have to supply them in one shot.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
All this is, if I understand it correctly, is a different way of doing the accounting. All employee time—whether it’s direct or indirect, idle time or operating time, or whatever—is operational expense, according to Jonah. You’re still accounting for it. It’s just that his way is simpler, and you don’t have to play as many games.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation. The goal is to reduce operational expenses AND reduce inventories and increase throughput simultaneously.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The new orders have changed the balance. We took more orders, which by themselves didn’t turn any resource into a new bottleneck, but they did drastically reduce the amount of spare capacity on the non-bottlenecks, and we didn’t compensate with increased inventory in front of the bottleneck.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
If we reduce batch sizes by half, we also reduce by half the time it will take to process a batch. That means we reduce queue and wait by half as well. Reduce those by half, and we reduce by about half the total time parts spend in the plant. Reduce the time parts spend in the plant and our total lead time condenses. And with faster turn-around on orders, customers get their orders faster.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Flow means that inventories in the operation are moving. When inventory is not moving, inventory accumulates. Accumulation of inventory takes up space. Therefore, an intuitive way to achieve better flow is to limit the space allowed for inventory to accumulate. To achieve better flow, Ford limited the space allotted for work-in-process between each two work centers.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
An expert is not someone who gives you the answer, it is someone who asks you the right question.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The above doesn’t mean that, for environments in which the assumptions of Lean are not valid, fragments of Lean cannot be used.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Once the somebody is already on the payroll, it doesn’t cost us any more to have him be idle. Whether somebody produces parts or waits a few minutes doesn’t increase our operating expense. But excess inventory . . . now that ties up a lot of money.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Adhering to the flow concept mandates the abolishment of local efficiencies. Ohno addressed this issue again and again in his books, stressing that there is no point in encouraging people to produce if the products are not needed in the very short-term. This emphasis is probably the reason that outside Toyota TPS first became known as Just-in-time production.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The daring nature of Ford’s method is revealed when one realizes that a direct consequence of limiting the space is that when the allotted space is full, the workers feeding it must stop producing. Therefore, in order to achieve flow, Ford had to abolish local efficiencies. In other words, flow lines are flying in the face of conventional wisdom; the convention that, to be effective, every worker and every work center have to be busy 100% of the time.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
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. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done. This challenging of basic assumptions is essential to breakthroughs.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
But, there is another effect that stems from restricting the accumulation of inventory. It makes it very visible to spot the real problems that jeopardize the flow—when one work center in a line stops producing for more than a short while, soon the whole line stops. Ford took advantage of the resulting clear visibility to better balance the flow by addressing and eliminating the apparent stoppages.4 The end result of abolishing local efficiencies and balancing the flow is a substantial increase in throughput. Henry Ford achieved the highest throughput per worker of any car manufacturing company of his time.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
We don’t break setups, or light a fire. We just point out to the foreman of that work center which job we would prefer he gets to next.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
What we had been doing many times was turning a nonbottleneck into a temporary bottleneck. This was forcing other work centers downstream from it to be idle, which reflected poorly on efficiencies. Now, even though we’ve recognized that non-bottlenecks have to be idle periodically, there is actually less idle time than before. Since we cut batch sizes, work is flowing through the plant more smoothly than ever. And it’s weird, but the idle time we do have is less noticeable. It’s spread out in shorter segments. Instead of people hanging around with nothing to do for a couple of hours, now they’ll have maybe a few tento twenty-minute waits through the day for the same volume of work. From everybody’s standpoint, that’s much better.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
To efficiently produce quality products sounds like a good goal. But can that goal keep the plant working? I’m bothered by some of the examples that come to mind. If the goal is to produce a quality product efficiently, then how come Volkswagen isn’t still making Bugs?
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Since the strength of the chain is determined by the weakest link, then the first step to improve an organization must be to identify the weakest link.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
And it became even more interesting when we realized that we were visiting the same six or seven work centers every time. They’re not bottlenecks, but the sequence in which they perform their jobs became very important. We call them ‘capacity constraint resources,’ CCR for short.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
