...Name: Thien Duong The Goal Assignment Question 1 Based on the definition of each type, we can realize that Alex Rogo’s plant does not follow the repetitive process, because his plant receives different kinds of orders to product different outputs. Furthermore, all orders do not follow the same sequence of tasks. For instance, there are only 80% of materials that come through the NCX-10 machine. In fact, they only use the repetitive process as the final process to assemble their finished products. In contrast, Alex Rogo ‘s plant is a mix of job shop and batch process. The orders of his plant are similar to job shops, in that have a high variety of inputs and tasks. Each job should be scheduled scientifically or the whole system will be inefficient. However, in my point of view, Alex Rojo still manages his plant more like a batch process, since his plant take moderate volume orders. Each batch moves from one work center to another work center. The employment and the equipment used are flexbile. In particularly, when Alex Rogo recognizes the bottleneck from the NCX-10 machine, he assigns more mechanics from other work centers to operate that NCX-10. He also takes advantage of old machines with the same function of NCX-10 in order increase the capacity at the bottleneck. In my opinion, Alex Rogo’s plant has two competitive advantages, which are quality and innovation. Alex Rogo’s plant focuses on the quality of the products they deliver. In particular, they operate the quality...
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...Understanding the Goal | Application of the theory of constraints | Christopher Wilson | 02/09/2013 BADM635 – 0 Spring 2013 02/09/2013 BADM635 – 0 Spring 2013 The basis of the novel, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement revolves around the life of Alex Rogo. Rogo is the Plant Manager for Uniware a division of a company called Unico. Rogo’s problems arise after and upset customers contacts Rogo’s boss, Bill Peach, complaining that their order is overdue by several weeks and they are not happy. Once Rogo is confronted by Peach, Peach informs Rogo that he does not see any reason to keep his plant open. They are behind on almost every order, they are in the red in terms of profit and he is going to make a recommendation to close the plant. Rogo pleads with Peach to give him time to turn the plant around and show an improvement. Peach offers Rogo three months to show some type of improvement or his recommendation will stand. Due to the limited amount of time available, there are not many outside tools available such as consultants, surveys, etc. With very few hopes, Rogo foresees the inevitable until he remembers his conversation with Jonah, a physicist Rogo knew from a previous job. When Rogo determines that there is no hope for his plant and he feels that all is lost, he remembers the conversation that he had with Jonah while waiting for a flight. During the conversation, Jonah inquires a series of questions to analyze how well Rogo’s plan is actually...
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...management oriented novel, “The Goal,” which focuses on constraint management and strategic capacity planning. This novel was closely related to the BADM 375 class materials and helped me understand various concepts and theories with real world examples in the novel. The novel provides several key takeaways through Mr. Alex Rogo, a manager of a failing manufacturing facility. Mr. Bill Peach, the division vice-president, assigns Rogo to revive the failing plant in three months. Rogo has to improve plant’s ability to consistently ship out quality goods out the door on time with the optimal cost. In the plant, while finished and WIP inventories are soaring, the plant struggles with months of production backlog and constant late shipments. Due to many bottlenecks in the plant, Rogo initially faces various problems to make profits. Bottleneck, as we learned in class, means a “point of congestion” in a system, and the plant had several “resources whose capacities were equal to or less than the demand placed upon them (139).” With these constraints, Rogo had one goal in his mind and that was to turn things around for the plant and start making money. In the novel, Rogo encountered his physics professor, Jonah. In their meeting, Rogo discusses about the current situation of managing the plant. Rogo tells Jonah that his plant’s productivity seemed to increase due to decline in price per part and increase in efficiency. Jonah challenges him by questioning Rogo’s measurement of efficiency and...
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...In Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement”, tells a story about Alex Rogo going through hard times, in both his work life and personal life. Alex Rogo is the manager of UniCo a manufacturing plant operating inefficiently and unprofitable. His boss, Mr. Peach, gave him an ultimatum to keep the business running and profitable within three month time span (Goldratt & Cox, 2004, p. 6). The most important issues Mr. Rogo faces in the manufacturing plant are internal constraints. The constraints Mr. Rogo faces are his disengagement in the plants performance and knowledge, inventory, robots working under their capacity resulting in late fulfilled orders. Six Sigma can alleviate the constraints and make the plant efficient and profitable. A plan applying this technique will be explained to make UniCo efficient and profitable. The ideology of every business is to make money. Mr. Rogo’s manufacturing plant is not the exception. Mr. Rogo’s unawareness of the level of efficiency in the plant was projected to the employees resulting in not understanding the direction and the goal of the company. In addition, management was unable to understand and identify constraints in the process due to inadequate reporting. These led to find issues such as constraints in bottlenecks, traditional ways of computing profit, and the relationship between human labor capacity and robots (machine) time. The inventory and materials is another constraint identified...
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...‘THE GOAL’ A Process of Ongoing Improvement IILINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY STATE FARM HALL OF BUSINESS MQM - 427 By: Vashisth Sharma Introduction I usually do not read books (except my course books), so when Dr. Selegna asked to read it I thought this is going to be the toughest thing to do in this semester. I had a perception that The Goal – A process of continuous improvement is a collection of boring theories of operations management, but when I started reading it I totally got sucked into it. It is a classic example of a book which has good story along with something really useful associated with it. The author has used a story to convey a pragmatic approach of doing operations of any kind of business. The purpose of this paper is to cover major concepts which are covered in the book in terms of operations. It is also intended not to just convey the information which has been covered in the book, rather link the concepts discussed of it to what we discussed in the class. I would like to sincerely thank Dr. Selegna for giving this assignment to me which was a very fruitful learning experience which will be remembered by me for my entire life. Summary The Goal – A process of continuous improvement is written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, which is an exceptional book having a business side to it along with fiction. The book is mainly focused around a plant manager at UniCo Manufacturing Corporation, Alex Rogo’s life. The author starts the novel by describing a...
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...Introduction The book “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt tells a story about how a plant manager of UniCo succeeded in redirecting the company to become profitable again by implementing the theory of constraints. It is written as a novel to help teach people on how imply the theory of constraints to the real life situation. The Goal Summary Alex Rogo is the main character in the novel and he is the plant manager of UniCo. He was given a three-months period by the vice-president of the company to get the company back on track or they have to shut it down. Under a lot of pressures, both from his personal life with his wife and the company that he works for, Alex Rogo seek advice from his old college physics teacher named Jonah. Having told the problems to Jonah, the physics teacher then crafted three measurements for Alex to help him solve the problems. And that is by measuring the throughput, operational expenses, and inventory. To increase throughput, while simultaneously reducing operational expenses and inventory could help him increase the net profit, as it was Alex’s goal at that time. Alex was asked by his teacher to look for those three measurements in his plant. However, Alex still could not find the answers to those three measurements. On one Saturday morning, he remembered that he needed to take his boy to an overnight hike for Boy Scout event. He needed to lead the group because the troop leader was sick. During the hike, he realizes the line closing and spreading...
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...people inside will use to make something. On the opposite side, more trucks are being filled with what they have produced. Sometimes product delivery could be delayed, and the plant is losing money. The division vice-president has to get managers together to discuss the problems from reports, and gives the order that the problem will be fixed in specific time. Then, the production manager and the staff need to follow the order and even do the overtime working to solve the problem. During problem solving the conflicts between managers and labors could appear. 2. In trying to identify the real goal of the organization, Alex Rogo assesses the merits of the value creating activities identified in the textbook. Choose two value creating activities identified in the textbook. Explain how Alex analyzes the two activities you have selected in identifying the “Goal.” What does Alex Rogo identify as the “Goal”...
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...| The Goal | Global Supply Chain | The Goal happens to be one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time .It’s a story about how Alex Rogo saves his plant using operations management techniques. It simplifies each concept very easily that everyone can understand. Plus it’s a very aspirational book about how to survive in a crisis situation. There are a few aspects of the book which stood out in my mind 1) bottleneck concept 2) Balance your personal and work life 3) Communication with all employees and making every process simple and easy for all to understanding finally 4) the blessing of having a good experienced staff . Even though I've read about bottleneck in my operations management class but still the concept of was never clear to me. But this book gave a very clear idea to me about what does this term means, especially with the help of real life problems included. How should you manage all the equipment’s process time in such a manner that you don't waste alot of time. Inventory problem is also very common issue in almost all types of organizations, ideally inventory should be kept to a minimum. The reason for that is it wastes money. As we see the same problem happening in the book. Goal of a company is not only to improve one measure in isolation. The goal is to reduce the operational expense and reduce inventory while simultaneously increase the throughput. My dad runs a book trading business and he always likes keeping a lot of inventory in...
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...The Goal was the first manufacturing management book I read in English. There is no theoretical framework in the book, so it is both interesting and easy to understand. This book was written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, tells a fictional story about Alex Rogo, a manufacturing plant manager who struggled with situation that his plant faced with losses and shut, with the help of Jonah and through the efforts of the team, Rogo finally found out the way to save the plant and increase production efficiency, compress production time and reduce the production cost. It ultimately changed the entire plant as well as the situation of the company as a whole. It gave me a different insight into an upper level of management achieving a purpose. For the factories, chaotic production system, higher production costs and longer lead times are common problems. The theory of Constraints which was introduced in the book is a good tool to help us solve these problems. Besides this, what I learned in the book is far more than the application of the theory itself. First, find the goal. When Rogo sought a solution of factory predicament from Jonah, the first question this physicist asked him was what is the goal of the factory? This seems like a simple question. But soon Rogo found that this question is not simple, he realized that the "goal" is the starting point and the final destination of the managers, what he did before was just specious stereotypes in guiding decision-making. In fact...
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...Chapter One The first chapter gets the reader acquainted with Mr. Alex Rogo and his apparent problems with his production plant. This is shown through a confrontation between Mr. Rogo and his boss Mr. Peach, the Division Vice President. The dispute is over an overdue order #41427. Through their conversation it’s learned that Mr. Peach will not settle for anything less than the order being shipped today, and since the plant is neither productive nor profitable, Alex has three months to show an improvement or the plant will be shut down! Chapter Two This chapter gives insight to Alex’s home life. Since moving back to his hometown six months ago, it seems adjustment isn’t going well for his family. It’s great for Alex, but it’s a big change from the city life that his wife is used to. You also experience Mr. Rogo’s background through his reflections back on his travels to eventually find himself back where he started. "He’s now 38 years old and a crummy plant manager". By the way, the order #41427 does get shipped, but not very efficiently. All hands in the plant are working on one order with forbidden overtime to boot. Chapter Three Mr. Peach calls a meeting at headquarters for all plant managers and his staff. At the meeting everybody finds out how bad things are and are given goals to achieve for the next quarter. Through the grapevine Mr. Rogo finds out perhaps why Mr. Peach has been acting so erratic lately, the Division has one year to improve or it’s going...
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...The Goal is a very compelling novel. Novel, HUH!! Who ever heard of a novel about a production plant? Well, Eli has made the production managers have quite an epiphany. In one book he might have changed the whole world of cost accounting. Eli approached the production world with a common sense view. Using just one goal, making money, he referenced every activity to it. Eli said, "I view science as nothing more than an understanding of the way the world is and why it is that way." You see, Eli is a physicist, and in being one, has to understand why things work the way they do. His common sense approach is illustrated beautifully in this novel. He has looked at cost accounting from the outside and has developed a whole new system because of it. Everyone from accountants to production managers to CEO’s should read this book. Because of its fundamentals, it should be part of the curriculum of every accounting program. This novel has and continues to help the industry to make strides toward continuous improvement. Chapter One The first chapter gets the reader acquainted with Mr. Alex Rogo and his apparent problems with his production plant. This is shown through a confrontation between Mr. Rogo and his boss Mr. Peach, the Division Vice President. The dispute is over an overdue order #41427. Through their conversation it’s learned that Mr. Peach will not settle for anything less than the order being shipped today, and since the plant is neither productive nor profitable, Alex has...
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...Analyzing “The Goal” as Fictional Case Study Abstract As a fictional case study, Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel about manufacturing, “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement,” presents a constraint-focused approach to production management. As a novel, the book does not emphasize the quantitative details of the plant improvements. However, a great amount of information about the plant is spread throughout the book. By collecting and analyzing this data, a concrete picture may be developed of the plant’s capacity and its improvements, which can greatly help the book’s readers understand and evaluate the cumulative impact from the plant’s “process of ongoing improvement.” Keywords: Production planning, Theory of constraints, Drum buffer rope 1. Introduction: The Goal as Fictional Case Study Eliyahu Goldratt’s manufacturing novel The Goal: A Process of Continuous Improvement has inspired countless professionals in production (and many other fields (Whitford, 2004)) to embark on their own efforts of continuous improvement. As Rand (1986) writes, “It’s a novel, but it’s also a manufacturing text-book, and it’s good on both accounts.” Many reviewers have agreed The Goal is an easy-to read way to get an introduction to production realities (Belis, 1994, The Economist 1995, Dani 2006, Rand 1986). However, no one has taken a detailed look at the numbers presented in the book as a fictional case study. The concept of drum-buffer-rope (DBR) production control has been discussed...
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...Constraint Management at UniCo: Analyzing “The Goal” as Fictional Case Study Abstract As a fictional case study, Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel about manufacturing, “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement,” presents a constraint-focused approach to production management. As a novel, the book does not emphasize the quantitative details of the plant improvements. However, a great amount of information about the plant is spread throughout the book. By collecting and analyzing this data, a concrete picture may be developed of the plant’s capacity and its improvements, which can greatly help the book’s readers understand and evaluate the cumulative impact from the plant’s “process of ongoing improvement.” Keywords: Production planning, Theory of constraints, Drum buffer rope 1. Introduction: The Goal as Fictional Case Study Eliyahu Goldratt’s manufacturing novel The Goal: A Process of Continuous Improvement has inspired countless professionals in production (and many other fields (Whitford, 2004)) to embark on their own efforts of continuous improvement. As Rand (1986) writes, “It’s a novel, but it’s also a manufacturing text-book, and it’s good on both accounts.” Many reviewers have agreed The Goal is an easy-to read way to get an introduction to production realities (Belis, 1994, The Economist 1995, Dani 2006, Rand 1986). However, no one has taken a detailed look at the numbers presented in the book as a fictional case study. The concept of drum-buffer-rope (DBR) production...
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...Captured by Plamen T. THE GOAL A Process of Ongoing Improvement THIRD REVISED EDITION By Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox With interviews by David Whitford, Editor at Large, Fortune Small Business North River Press Captured by Plamen T. Additional copies can be obtained from your local bookstore or the publisher: The North River Press Publishing Corporation P.O. Box 567 Great Barrington, MA 01230 (800) 486-2665 or (413) 528-0034 www.northriverpress.com First Edition Copyright © 1984 Eliyahu M. Goldratt Revised Edition Copyright © 1986 Eliyahu M. Goldratt Second revised Edition © 1992 Eliyahu M. Goldratt Third Revised Edition © 2004 Eliyahu M. Goldratt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldratt, Eliyahu M., 1948The goal: a process of ongoing improvement I. Coxjeff, 1951-. II. Title PR9510.9.G64G61986 823 ISBN: 0-88427-178-1 86-12566 Captured by Plamen T. 1 INTRODUCTION The Goal is about science and education. I believe that these two words have been abused to the extent that their original meanings have been lost in a fog of too much respect and mystery. Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable scientists, is not about...
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...Captured by Plamen T. THE GOAL A Process of Ongoing Improvement THIRD REVISED EDITION By Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox With interviews by David Whitford, Editor at Large, Fortune Small Business North River Press Captured by Plamen T. Additional copies can be obtained from your local bookstore or the publisher: The North River Press Publishing Corporation P.O. Box 567 Great Barrington, MA 01230 (800) 486-2665 or (413) 528-0034 www.northriverpress.com First Edition Copyright © 1984 Eliyahu M. Goldratt Revised Edition Copyright © 1986 Eliyahu M. Goldratt Second revised Edition © 1992 Eliyahu M. Goldratt Third Revised Edition © 2004 Eliyahu M. Goldratt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldratt, Eliyahu M., 1948The goal: a process of ongoing improvement I. Coxjeff, 1951-. II. Title PR9510.9.G64G61986 823 ISBN: 0-88427-178-1 86-12566 Captured by Plamen T. 1 INTRODUCTION The Goal is about science and education. I believe that these two words have been abused to the extent that their original meanings have been lost in a fog of too much respect and mystery. Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable...
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