Quotes About Efficiency

First, make sure the bottlenecks' time is not wasted," he says. "How is the time of a bottleneck wasted? One way is for it to be sitting idle during a lunch break. Another is for it to be processing parts which are already defective—or which will become defective through a careless worker or poor process control. A third way to waste a bottleneck's time is to make it work on parts you don't need.

Just remember we are always talking about the organization as a whole—not about the manufacturing department, or about one plant, or about one department within the plant. We are not concerned with local optimums.

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.

So the way to express the goal is this? Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense.

If we cut our batch sizes in half, then I guess that at any one time we'd have half the work-in-process on the floor. I guess that means we'd only need half the investment in work-in-process to keep the plant working. If we could work it out with our vendors, we could conceivably cut all our inventories in half, and by cutting our inventories in half, we reduce the amount of cash tied up at any one time, which eases the pressure on cash flow.

Once the somebody is already on the payroll, it doesn't cost us any more to have him be idle. Whether somebody produces parts or waits a few minutes doesn't increase our operating expense. But excess inventory . . . now that ties up a lot of money.

If Ralph can determine a schedule for releasing red-tag materials based on the bottlenecks, he can also determine a schedule for final assembly. Once he knows when the bottleneck parts will reach final assembly, he can calculate backwards and determine the release of the non-bottleneck materials along each of their routes. In this way, the bottlenecks will be determining the release of all the materials in the plant.

By running non-bottlenecks for "efficiency," we've built inventories far in excess of demand.

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.

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?

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?

Impatience and cutting corners: it's the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.

How did I ever live before I had an AI in my brain?

As an old crew chief of mine used to point out, you might be dead long before the problem you didn't have the resources to fix right now became a critical need, so why waste more resources worrying about it?

Really, she was going to have to learn to better organize her time. Maybe she should hire a lifestyle consultant…

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.

more smoothly than you have done this

I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly outdo yourself, you have to constantly outdo your neighbor - all of the stuff that creates an incredibly productive society, but also a very neurotic one.

more work is accomplished in one day than many diligent scribes could do in a year….

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.