Quotes from Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Do you realize that the only way you can create excess inventories is by having excess manpower?" he says. I think about it. After a minute, I have to conclude he's right; machines don't set up and run themselves. People had to create the excess inventory.

And if quality were truly the goal, then how come a company like Rolls Royce very nearly went bankrupt?

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?

A plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient.

Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious.

am suggesting that you question how you are managing the capacity of your plant.

All those calls and meetings were fire fighting. I remind myself. No fires, no fighting. Now, everything is running smoothly— almost too smoothly.

Well, because if we don't have enough capacity, we're cheating ourselves out of potential throughput. And if we have more than enough capacity, we're wasting money. We're missing an opportunity to reduce operational expense.

Henry Ford achieved the highest throughput per worker of any car manufacturing company of his time.

Mr. Granby next time you two have

To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.

organization?" he asks. "The goal is to produce products as efficiently as we can," I tell him. "Wrong," says Jonah. "That's not it. What is the real goal?

Alex, you cannot understand the meaning of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then, you're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words." "Okay, then it's market share," I tell him. "That's the goal." "Is it?" he asks. He steps into the plane. "Hey! Can't you tell me?" I call to him. "Think about it, Alex. You can find the answer with your own mind," he says.

It's not the material that concerns me," I say. "It's the capacity. You see, when the problem that caused the stoppage is overcome, the upstream resources not only have to supply the current consumption of the bottleneck, at the same time they have to rebuild the inventory.

The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money," I say to him. "And everything else we do is a means to achieve the goal.

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.

Through sales—not production. If you produce something, but don't sell it, it's not throughput.

En todos lados, el mejoramiento ha sido interpretado como sinónimo de ahorro en costos. La gente se concentra en reducir el gasto de operación como si fuera el indicador mas importante.

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.

Eli Goldratt passed away at his home in Israel on June 11th, 2011, in the company of his family and close friends.

We need a process," he says. "That's obvious. It's too bad that the five-step process that we developed turned out to be false. No . . . Wait a minute Alex, that's not the case. At the end, the problem was not wandering bottlenecks. It was insufficient protection for the existing bottlenecks. Maybe we can use that five-step process?

What is needed is just the courage to face inconsistencies and to avoid running away from them just because "that's the way it was always done".

Every organization was built for a purpose. We haven't built any organization just for the sake of its mere existence.

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.