Quotes from Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Eighty percent of your products require at least one part from a bottleneck. What are you going to substitute for the bottleneck part that hasn't shown up yet?" Bob scratches his head and says, "Oh, yeah . . . I forgot." "So if we can't assemble," says Stacey, "we get piles of inventory again. Only this time the excess inventory doesn't accumulate in front of a bottleneck; it stacks up in front of final assembly.

With the bottlenecks more productive now, our throughput has gone up and our backlog is declining. But making the bottlenecks more productive has put more demand on the other work centers. If the demand on another work center has gone above one hundred percent, then we've created a new bottleneck.

Dammit, what the hell is going on out there? I had assumed the parts that have to go through a bottleneck would reach assembly last. Is there a materials shortage on those green-tagged parts? Some kind of vendor problem?" I ask her. Stacey shakes her head. "No, I haven't had any problems with purchasing. And none of the parts have any processing by outside contractors. The problem is definitely internal. That's why I really think we have one or more new bottlenecks.

The bottlenecks have spread." "What do you mean 'the bottlenecks have spread'?" I ask. "Is there a disease out there or something?" "No, what I mean is we have a new bottleneck—or maybe even more than one; I'm not sure yet.

sit there marveling that we're going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.

I sit there marveling that we're going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.

What we know now," I tell him, "is that we shouldn't be looking at each local area and trying to trim it. We should be trying to optimize the whole system. Some resources have to have more capacity than others. The ones at the end of the line should have more than the ones at the beginning—sometimes a lot more. Am I right?

For a foreman, heat-treat seems like a very small kingdom, not much of a prize. There is nothing intrinsically attractive about running that operation, and having only two people to manage makes it seem like no big deal. To prevent it from seeming like a demotion to them, I make a point to go down there periodically on each of the shifts. In talking to the foreman, I drop some rather direct hints that the rewards will be great for anyone who can improve the output of heat-treated parts.

the improvement efforts of other companies are misguided since they are aimed at achieving cost savings rather than being totally focused on improving the flow.

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?

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.

dime cómo me mides y te diré cómo me comportaré". No

The above doesn't mean that, for environments in which the assumptions of Lean are not valid, fragments of Lean cannot be used

Throughput is the money coming in. Inventory is the money currently inside the system. And operational expense is the money we have to pay out to make throughput happen. One measurement for the incoming money, one for the money still stuck inside, and one for the money going out.

The goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation. The goal is to reduce operational expenses AND reduce inventories and increase throughput simultaneously.