1 What is the goal?
The goal of the company is to make money—plain and simple. Alex realizes this after Jonah asks him to think about what the goal of the plant is. The goal for Alex, given him by Bill Peach, is to make operations at the production plant profitable in three months time. This is quite a challenge considering the plant has been unprofitable and behind schedule for a good long while. The main challenge, as the author puts it, is not a problem of obtaining new smarts or intelligence, but rather the challenge of drumming up the courage to face the inconsistencies of life dead-on and to not look away from them. This is where the beginning of problem-solving begins to take place. No matter how many models one has or what level of education or what field of education, if one is not willing to look at the problems in the face, they will not get solved. So in essence, the goal of the book is to show people how to face their problems instead of searching for someone else to blame. It is about taking ownership of a situation and getting engaged instead of lining up the parts and hoping they just stay where they’re supposed to stay and that all goes well.
2. Comment on Alex's personal life, both with his family and his relationship with his staff,peers and superiors.
Alex is in trouble with his wife: since they moved, she has not been happy. He is always at the plant, late into the night, and she feels neglected. He promises to take her out to dinner but keeps putting it off as though she will keep—or as though she comes in second in his life and the plant comes in first. Clearly, he does not have his priorities right. People should come before profits—that is what makes profit come in the first place. Alex needs to focus on the people in his life and start giving them more support. This goes both up and down the ladder. His relationship with Bill Peach is strained, for example: Peach brought him in to do a job and fix and bad situation and Alex so far has not managed to do it. In fact, the situation has gotten worse, not better, over the past 6 months. Alex keeps wanting to blame the problem on personnel, but Peach won’t have it. Alex looks at the model and the figures and feels that everything looks good, so he cannot understand why shipments are too slow in getting out the door. His whole life is focused on numbers and systems instead of on people.
That is why when he first runs into an old friend and physicist named Jonah, it is the beginning of Alex’s movement in the right direction. It gets him thinking about people instead of problems and profits. For example, Alex thinks that the use of robots, as he tells Jonah, is helping the plant increase its efficiency—but Jonah disagrees. It is after reflecting on Jonah’s words that Alex begins to seriously start to get engaged with his employees. He strikes up a conversation with Lou the plant controller, and they both agree that the goal of the plant is to make money. By talking things out with his guys in the plant, he is beginning to get them involved in the problem solving process too. The goal becomes getting everyone involved to think of where problems are and to see what inefficiencies are occurring in real life rather than on paper.
3.What triggered his understanding of his plant's dilemma?
Alex’s understanding of his plant’s dilemma started with his chance encounter with Jonah who recommended to Alex that he start thinking more seriously about the goal of the plant. Alex was under the assumption that having a great new robot was all that was needed, but Jonah started telling him to think about throughput and bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks. That got Alex thinking about the real problems of the plant a little bit more. Then, after having to take his son to his Boy Scout hike, Alex began to try an experiment with the hikers to see if he could close some of the gaps that he was seeing in the line. Instead of putting the fastest person at the lead, he put the slowest walker at the lead. This helped to close the gaps and keep everyone moving more uniformly. It also helped to speed up...
This worked because the slow walker now had an incentive to move more quickly with so many people behind him and was not afforded the opportunity of simply falling back and letting everything go on ahead of him. The idea that Alex picked up from this was that it could be applied to his production plant. Instead of letting the fastest parts of the plant run ahead and causing orders to pile up in one spot while falling behind in another spot, he saw the need to readjust the way orders were processed and focusing on clearing out bottlenecks and getting production running in a smoother line. Part of this process focused on doing smaller batches at a time instead of big orders all at once. By doing smaller batches at a time over a stretch, he could get the contracts he needed to stay in business and his clients were happy because they were getting what they needed.
4. Did the plant Controller act ethically, when he adjusted figures.
On the one hand, the plant Controller acted ethically when he adjust the figures because the adjustment expressed the reality which was that costs were going down, not up. On the other hand, the Controller acted unethically because adjusting the figures in this manner was against the norms as far as the Accounting department was concerned. At the end of the day, however, the Controller was not making up numbers just to make the plant look better than it was; he was just trying to reflect the actual condition of the plant’s costs in the numbers so that there was no confusion as to the reality of the situation. In this case, the accounting department had to do a better job of adjusting to the reality. The Controller could be said, therefore, in this sense to have acted ethically because his adjustments were honest.
5. What is the significance of throughput"? what does the endingg inventory play in the evalluation.
As Alex notes when he is leading the Boy Scout troop, the slowest is the one who will govern throughput. Throughput is the maximum rate at which things are processed or produced. The weakest link in a system will show exactly how strong a system is. The slowest producer in a group will show just how quickly the group can produce as a whole. The slowest part in the plant will dictate throughput, as all orders will be waiting on that one part.
Ending inventory plays a part in the evaluation of throughput because it shows money is tied up still in inventory or if it is out the door and on the way to being used somewhere else. Inventory is dead money, so to speak—it is money that is just sitting around not being put to use. Upping throughput without reducing inventory does not help the plant to make money, because money is still being tied up in inventory. Reducing inventory helps to get the plant in a better position to make money, which it can do by boosting throughput. And throughput, Alex learns, can be boosted by focusing on the weakest links in the production line—the bottlenecks—and focusing on working around them, sorting out the problems associated with the bottlenecks and ceasing to ramp up production elsewhere while avoiding dealing with the bottleneck.
6. How does Jonah, force Alex to "think outside the box" to solve his plants problems?
Jonah gets Alex to think outside the box by constantly posing questions to Alex rather than feeding him the answers. The book uses a type of Socratic method to get Alex to the answers he needs. This method encourages outside the box thinking, as the answers are never presented ready-made on a platter. Alex has to engage with the problems, which Jonah helps him to identify. Jonah then asks Alex to think about certain concepts and ideas, like throughput and statistical fluctuation. By thinking about these things, Alex begins to realize that the numbers do not necessary solve problems. There is a great deal more happening in a plant other than just locking in robots and expecting everything to go smoothly.
By starting to experiment with concepts, Alex starts to truly think outside the box. For example, it would never occur to…
