Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes
-
What my people and I have done is to examine daily the queues in front of the assembly and in front of the bottlenecks— we call them ‘buffers.’ We check just to be sure that everything that’s scheduled to be worked on is there—that there are no ‘holes.’ We thought that if a new bottleneck pops up it would immediately show up as a hole in at least one of these buffers.
-
The important thing is you’ve just proven that any organization should be viewed as a chain. I can take it from here. 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. “Or links,” I correct. “Remember, an organization may be comprised of several independent chains.”
-
If you don't manufacture a quality product all you've got at the end is a bunch of expensive mistakes.
-
Ford’s starting point was that the key for effective production is to concentrate on improving the overall flow of products through the operations. His efforts to improve flow were so successful that, by 1926, the lead time from mining the iron ore to having a completed car composed of more than 5,000 parts, on the train ready for delivery, was 81 hours!3 Eighty years later, no car manufacturer in the world has been able to achieve, or even come close, to such a short lead time.
-
We’re dealing with the fact that we haven’t got any idea of what we’re doing. If we’re just looking for some arbitrary order, and we can choose among so many possibilities, then what’s the point in putting so much effort in collecting so much data? What do we gain from it, except the ability to impress people with some thick reports or to throw the company into another reorganization in order to hide from the fact that we don’t really understand what we’re doing? This avenue of first collecting data, getting familiar with the facts, seems to lead us nowhere. It’s nothing more than an exercise in futility. Come on, we need another way to attack the issue.
-
I’ve got the machines. I’ve got the people. I’ve got all the materials I need. I know there’s a market out there, because the competitors’ stuff is selling. So what the hell is it?
-
Eli Goldratt passed away at his home in Israel on June 11th, 2011, in the company of his family and close friends.
-
But when the nature of the constraint has changed, one would expect to see a major change in the way we operate all non-constraints.
-
I sit there marveling that we’re going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.
-
You forced us to view production as a means to satisfy sales. I want to change the role production is playing in getting sales.
-
All those calls and meetings were fire fighting. I remind myself. No fires, no fighting. Now, everything is running smoothly— almost too smoothly.
-
I smile and start to count on my fingers: One, people are good. Two, every conflict can be removed. Three, every situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, is exceedingly simple. Four, every situation can be substantially improved; even the sky is not the limit. Five, every person can reach a full life. Six, there is always a win-win solution. Shall I continue to count?
-
While they go get the others, I figure out the details. The system I’ve set up is intended to "process’’ matches. It does this by moving a quantity of match sticks out of their box, and through each of the bowls in succession. The dice determine how many matches can be moved from one bowl to the next. The dice represent the capacity of each resource, each bowl; the set of bowls are my dependent events, my stages of production. Each has exactly the same capacity as the others, but its actual yield will fluctuate somewhat.
-
Okay, so why was the plant built in the first place? It was built to produce products. Why can’t that be the goal? Jonah said it wasn’t. But I don’t see why it isn’t the goal. We’re a manufacturing company. That means we have to manufacture something, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the whole point, to produce products? Why else are we here?
-
So this is the goal: To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
-
We had physical constraints that helped us to focus our attention, to zoom in on the real policy constraint. That isn’t the case in the division. Over there we have excess capacity going through our ears. We have excess engineering resources that we succeed so brilliantly in wasting. I’m sure that there is no lack of markets. We simply don’t know how to put our act together to capitalize on what we have.
-
What was the nature of the answers, the solutions, that Jonah caused us to develop? They all had one thing in common. They all made common sense, and at the same time, they flew directly in the face of everything I’d ever learned. Would we have had the courage to try to implement them if it weren’t for the fact that we’d had to sweat to construct them? Most probably not. If it weren’t for the conviction that we gained in the struggle—for the ownership that we developed in the process—I don’t think we’d actually have had the guts to put our solutions into practice.
-
In order to significantly increase sales we have to increase the perception of value of the market for our products.
-
I reach for my briefcase, take out a yellow legal pad and take a pen from my coat pocket. Then I make a list of all the items people think of as being goals: cost-effective purchasing, employing good people, high technology, producing products, producing quality products, selling quality products, capturing market share. I even add some others like communications and customer satisfaction. All of those are essential to running the business successfully. What do they all do? They enable the company to make money. But they are not the goals themselves; they’re just the means of achieving the goal.
-
Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious.
-
You know what, it really highlights another problem. Changing the measurements’ scale of importance, moving from one world into another, is without a doubt a culture change. Let’s face it, that is exactly what we had to go through, a culture change. But how are we going to take the division through such a change?
-
Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.
-
What are we asking for? For the ability to answer three simple questions: ‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause the change?’ Basically what we are asking for is the most fundamental abilities one would expect from a manager. Think about it. If a manager doesn’t know how to answer those three questions, is he or she entitled to be called manager?
-
Can I assume that making people work and making money are the same thing?