Discussion Questions (Week 6)

THE GOAL Chap 1 – 15
1. Do you perceive that the people at the Bearington plant were like most manufacturing people in most companies? 2. Do you feel that the Bearington plant has the right equipment and technology to do the job? 3. What is the “Goal”? How is it related to the three performance measurements: NP, ROI & CF? Why does Alex need another set of measurement: Throughput, Inventory, OE? 4. How is "productivity" defined traditionally? How does Jonah define "productivity"? 5. How does Jonah define "Throughput", "Inventory", and "Operating Expense"? How are these definitions different from traditional definitions? 6. Using the robots as an example, explain: (1) How the standard cost system defines "efficiency" (2) How high efficiency could lead to local optimum 7. What are those three questions that Jonah asked Alex about the productivity of the robots? 8. Using the analogy between the hiking and a manufacturing operation, explain the phenomena of “dependent events” and “statistical fluctuations”. Explain what a “balanced plant” is and explain why it would not work. 9. Using the dice game to explain the phenomena of “dependent events” and “statistical fluctuations”. Explain why a “balanced plant” would not work. 10. Explain another real-life example to describe the phenomena of “dependent events” and “statistical fluctuations”? 11. The hiking did not go very well first, why? What did Alex do to improve the pace of the hiking? Why did he ask Herbie to lead the hiking? Did it work? 12. Explain the analogy between the hiking troop and a manufacturing operation in terms of Throughput, Inventory, OE, Dependent Events, Statistical Fluctuations, and Balanced Plant.

1

Discussion Questions (Week 7)

THE GOAL Chap 16-30
1. 2. 3. Using the robot as an example, explain the effects of statistical fluctuations and dependent events in chapter 17. Why did Jonah suggest “balance the flow with demand” instead of “balance capacity with demand”? How does Jonah define "bottleneck resource"? Is a bottleneck a bad thing to have? How did Alex identify the bottleneck resources in his plant? Why was he not able to compare the demand with the capacity to determine bottlenecks? What did Jonah suggest to deal with the two bottlenecks that Alex and his managers discovered? How did Jonah calculate the value of a "bottleneck part"? How is his approach different from conventional standard cost systems? Based on Jonah’s discussion in Chapter 19, provide examples of why the “efficiency” mindset could lead to negative effects. Explain how some corporate policies could be the bottleneck for making improvement? What did Alex and his managers do to increase the capacity or the efficiency of the bottleneck resource? Are any of these approaches contradictory to conventional practices? Are they expensive/difficult to implement? Explain the red and green tags system that Alex and his managers developed. What was the purpose of this tag system? How did the system work? Evaluate the decisions of bringing back Zmegma and engineering changes (p. 193) based on the T, I, and OE measurement.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. Use the robot example to explain why “the sum of local optimums is not equal to the global optimum”. Explain a similar example from an organization? 11. Understand the “drum” and “rope” ideas that Alex’s kids provided to solve his production problems. In addition, what did Ralph suggest to use the ideas to release materials for both bottleneck and non-bottleneck resources? What was the negative of applying this method in terms of efficiency? 12. Even with the improvement, Peach still threatened to close down Alex’s plant. Why? What did Jonah suggest to achieve even more improvement? From the perspective of traditional measurement system, what are the negatives of Jonah’s suggestion? Be sure to read and understand the conversation between Alex and Julie on pages 239-240. 13. Define "lead time". What are the four elements included in lead time? How are these four elements affected (increase or decrease) if batch size is reduced in half? 14. How does the batch size reduction in non-bottleneck resource affect T, I and OE? 15. What did Alex promise Johnny Jons in order to get more business for his plant? What changes did he have to make in his production systems to deliver his promise?

2

Discussion Questions (Week 8)

THE GOAL Chap 31 – 40
1. For any organizations that you are aware of, identify an outdated policy that had a good intention in the first place but has become a bottleneck to prevent the organization from making improvement. 2. Give examples from Alex’s company to illustrate the notion of “common sense is not common at all.” 3. Do you feel that Socratic approach, “Don’t give the answers, just ask the questions!”, is an effective way to teach or to overcome the resistance to change? Why did Julie suggest that Alex needs to learn more Socrate’s method from Jonah? 4. Explain the discussion in Chapter 33 that reducing inventory could lead to negatives. 5. Define “capacity constraint resources” (CCR). Are they the same as bottlenecks? Why are they critical? 6. What did Alex and his managers decide as to the first thing Alex should do in his new position? Why was Mendeleev’s classification involved in the discussion? What was the benefit when Mendeleev began to arrange elements on a periodic table? What did Alex and his manager learn from this example? 7. What is the fallacy of the “product cost concept”? What did Alex do to obtain more orders? 8. Was the observation in Chapter 39 regarding “the bottlenecks are moving all the time” correct? What was the real cause for the whole mess? 9. Describe the five-step improvement process in relation to specific changes that the Bearington plant managers made in their plant. As an example, what exactly did they do corresponding to Step #1 – Identify system constraint(s)? 10. What are the three questions in the thinking process?

3