Quotes from Eliyahu M. Goldratt

La máxima desviación de una operación precedente pasara a ser el punto inicial de la operación siguiente.

Everyone is silent.

If we need synchronized efforts," I continue, "Then the contribution of any single person to the organization's purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.

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.

And he's saying, "Alex, I have come to the conclusion that productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive.

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.

But as you said, the complexity of our organizations almost guarantees that there are not many of them.

Whenever we think we have final answers progress, science, and better understanding ceases.

What aspect of operation did we change?" Mimicking his voice I answer, "The measurements, the policies, the procedures. Many of them were cast into behavioral patterns. Lou, don't you see? The real constraints, even in our plant, were not the machines, they were the policies.

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 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?

No," he says. "Through sales— not production. If you produce something, but don't sell it, it's not throughput. Got it?

Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell." I

Operational expense," he says. "Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput.

the best thing to do would be to reorganize everything so the resource with the least capacity would be first in the routings. All other resources would have gradual increases in capacity to make up for the statistical fluctuations passed on through dependency.

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.

Deciding that the company is wasting too much money on duplicated efforts and thus moving to a more centralized mode. Ten years later, we want to encourage entrepreneurship and we move back to decentralization.

Was your plant able to ship even one more product per day as a result of what happened in the department where you installed the robots?

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.

Check your numbers if you'd like," says Jonah. "But if your inventories haven't gone down . . . and your employee expense was not reduced . . . and if your company isn't selling more products—which obviously it can't, if you're not shipping more of them—then you can't tell me these robots increased your plant's productivity.

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.

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.

that's a third assumption that's wrong," I say. "We've assumed that utilization and activation are the same. Activating a resource and utilizing a resource are not synonymous.

It is very unlikely your people are lying to you. But your measurements definitely are.