Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes
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Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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Why not make the work easier and more interesting so that people do not have to sweat? The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’ they go there to ‘think’.
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I sit there marveling that we’re going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.
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I still claim that there are only few constraints. Our division is too complex to have more than a very few independent chains. Lou, don’t you realize that everything we mentioned so far is closely connected? The lack of sensible long-term strategy, the measurement issues, the lag in product design, the long lead times in production, the general attitude of passing the ball, of apathy, are all connected. We must put our finger on the core problem, on the root that causes them all. That is what actually is meant by identify the constraint. It’s not prioritizing the bad effects, it’s identifying what causes them all.
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If any organization was built for a purpose and any organization is composed of more than one person, then we must conclude that the purpose of the organization requires the synchronized efforts of more than one person.
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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?
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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.
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There is an explanation to these companies’ failure to implement Lean; an explanation that is apparent to any objective observer of a company like Hitachi Tool Engineering. The failure is due to the fundamental difference in the production environments. When Taiichi Ohno developed TPS, he didn’t do it in the abstract; he developed it for his company. It is no wonder that the powerful application that Ohno developed might not work in fundamentally different production environments.
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Putting it precisely, activating a resource and utilizing a resource are not synonymous.
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All those calls and meetings were fire fighting. I remind myself. No fires, no fighting. Now, everything is running smoothly— almost too smoothly.
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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?
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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.
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The most demanding assumption that TPS makes about the production environment is that it is a stable environment. And it demands stability in three different aspects.
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Eli Goldratt passed away at his home in Israel on June 11th, 2011, in the company of his family and close friends.
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Never let something important become urgent.
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Whenever we think we have final answers progress, science, and better understanding ceases.
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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.
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So the way to express the goal is this? Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense.
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If synchronized efforts are required and the contribution of one link is strongly dependent on the performance of the other links, we cannot ignore the fact that organizations are not just a pile of different links, they should be regarded as chains.
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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.
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In order to significantly increase sales we have to increase the perception of value of the market for our products.