Traditional Day-To-Day Concepts In Alex Rogo's The Goal

The Goal is a novel that tells a story about a devoted plant manager, Alex Rogo. Mr. Rogo faces several challenges at the plant as the manager as his division is constantly behind in fulfilling their orders and has a negative cash flow. Mr. Rogo is given a three-week deadline to turn things around, fulfill orders and generate positive cash flow. Mr. Rogo is guided by his former physics professor, Jonah, where he learns that in order to succeed in business, you must be focused on; throughput, inventory and operational expenses. These concepts however, differ from our traditional day-to-day definitions.

Throughput is defined as the amount of material or items passing through a system or process. Inventory is defined as a complete list of items, or goods that are in stock and operational expenses is defined as expenditures that a business incurs to engage in any activities not directly associated with the production of goods or services.

However, in the novel, The Goal, Goldratt defines these concepts as the following: throughput is the rate of generating money by the particular system via sales. Inventory, is the types of good gathered to resale to make profit and operational expenses are the cost

Rogo had to alleviate, the NCX10 and the heat treatment. The Goal harped on saving time at the bottleneck, would lead to an hour saved throughout the whole system. Therefore, being strategically efficient was a key principle discussed. Mr. Rogo, went about solving this issue by creating a list of jobs that were getting delayed and the parts of those jobs that were going through the two bottlenecks. Mr. Rogo puts together a list of the orders in the system organized by the due date. The bottleneck operators are instructed to only work on those orders till they were all processed. Although this scheduling principle did not work, it is key to note the importance of efficiency and the key role it plays in the scheduling