Quotes About Efficiency

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Bottlenecks temporarily limit throughput. Maybe your plant is proof of that. But they have little impact upon inventory." "It's completely the opposite, Hilton," I say. "Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory. And I'll tell you what my plant really has shown: it's proved our performance measurements are wrong.

When you are productive you are accomplishing something in terms of your goal

A bottleneck," Jonah continues, "is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.

Balance flow, not capacity.