The Goal, story revolves around Alex Rojo -- the manufacturing plant manager struggling to save his UniCo plant located at Bearington, which is on the brink of shutting down. Alex is given 3 months to make the difference! As the novel begins, Alex deals with cost-cutting pressure, struggles to improve his production and shipping times and somehow is able to deliver the backlogged order, when pressed by his boss Mr. Peach. Alex is torn between professional and personal life issues, as he grapples to save his plant. In the end, Alex is successful in transforming his worst performing manufacturing plant into a profitable one with his mentor Jonah’s continuous support. Jonah prompts Alex that there is only one true goal of any business and it
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Alex and team learn from Jonah that they must adhere to “bottlenecks must be busy” principal. So, they design a ‘red and green color coding system’ -- red reflecting the bottleneck parts, which should be given priority and worked on first to avoid the ‘held-up’ at bottleneck and green reflecting non-bottleneck parts. With this new system, they do manage to ship orders faster and lower inventory, but it reveals more bottlenecks elsewhere. Upon further research, Alex and team realizes that their problem arose from the fact that non-bottlenecks were working at max capacity resulting into parts getting stacked up at the bottleneck, eventually leading up to the longer wait times at non-bottleneck parts for other dependent operations to finish the final assembly. So, they modify the ‘red and green system’ by putting old machines back into the service to perform the bottleneck operations. This solution does seem to resolve the problem at hand, but deems inadequate when Mr. Peach mandates fifteen percent improvement for the next month. Jonah suggests cutting the batch sizes in half, so that all the costs would also be reduced by half, resulting into faster delivery times and comparatively smaller lead times for the new orders. This proves a viable solution, resulting into Alex’s promotion to the regional office, where he would manage three plants and new challenges await him. It becomes crucial for Alex to get his new team in-lined and on-boarded with his recent learnings from Jonah to achieve a similar success at the regional
Alex and team learn from Jonah that they must adhere to “bottlenecks must be busy” principal. So, they design a ‘red and green color coding system’ -- red reflecting the bottleneck parts, which should be given priority and worked on first to avoid the ‘held-up’ at bottleneck and green reflecting non-bottleneck parts. With this new system, they do manage to ship orders faster and lower inventory, but it reveals more bottlenecks elsewhere. Upon further research, Alex and team realizes that their problem arose from the fact that non-bottlenecks were working at max capacity resulting into parts getting stacked up at the bottleneck, eventually leading up to the longer wait times at non-bottleneck parts for other dependent operations to finish the final assembly. So, they modify the ‘red and green system’ by putting old machines back into the service to perform the bottleneck operations. This solution does seem to resolve the problem at hand, but deems inadequate when Mr. Peach mandates fifteen percent improvement for the next month. Jonah suggests cutting the batch sizes in half, so that all the costs would also be reduced by half, resulting into faster delivery times and comparatively smaller lead times for the new orders. This proves a viable solution, resulting into Alex’s promotion to the regional office, where he would manage three plants and new challenges await him. It becomes crucial for Alex to get his new team in-lined and on-boarded with his recent learnings from Jonah to achieve a similar success at the regional