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Book Summary – The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

The Goal - Book summary

In unstable, fast-changing environments, flexible operations and quick turnaround can offer real competitive advantages by allowing you to respond quickly to the market. In The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Eliyahu Goldratt uses a story to explain several inter-related management concepts which are especially useful for operations management and strategic planning. You can also apply the ideas in general management and in your personal life. In The Goal summary, we’ll outline some of these key ideas, including the Theory of Constraints and the Socratic approach.

What is The Goal about?

The story centers around Alex Rogo (“Al”), a plant manager at UniCo Manufacturing who had been transferred to a loss-making manufacturing plant that was perpetually late with its orders. Six months into the job, Al was shocked to hear that every plant in the division was losing money. If things didn’t improve in a year, the entire division would be sold off. Alex was in turn given a moratorium: if he couldn’t turn his plant around in 3 months, it would be closed down.

Alex had no idea why his plant was losing money even though it had the technology, people, materials and market demand. Fortunately, he bumped into his ex-Physics teacher, Jonah, who was now a specialist in organizational science. With Jonah’s help, Al’s plant became profitable, and achieved unparalleled quality and delivery times. Jonah also used the Socratic approach to help Al work out the solutions with his team and to improve his marriage.

We’ll now summarize some of the key ideas and steps behind the Theory of Constraints. In our full 12-page summary of The Goal, we share more detailed tips, including highlights of the story to illustrate how the concepts can be applied in real-life.

Knowing the Goal

Many companies use the term “productivity” to refer generically to efficiency or resource utilization. In this book, productivity is defined as bringing your organization toward its goal. To become more productive, you must first know your goal.

The goal of any manufacturing plant is to make money. If the plant can’t stay afloat, no other goals—be it to provide jobs, produce quality products or deliver customer satisfaction—would matter. In operational terms, “making money” can be translated into 3 key measures:

Increase Throughput

Throughput = the rate that the system generates money via sales. Producing products alone isn’t enough—the products must be sold.

Decrease Inventory

Inventory = all the money that has been invested by the system to buy things intended for sale. It includes everything that you can sell (e.g. parts, finished products, and equipment less depreciation costs).

Decrease Operating Expense

Operational expense = all the money that has been spent by the system to convert inventory into throughput. This includes all the money you’ve lost, e.g. labor and depreciation of tools and equipment.

These 3 measures jointly account for how money flows in, out, or gets stuck in a manufacturing system. The goal is to concurrently increase throughput and reduce inventory and operating expense.

The 5-Step Process of Ongoing Improvement

The story traces how Jonah guides Al’s team to apply these 5 steps to transform his loss-making plant into a profitable one that creates real competitive advantages for the company.  We’ll briefly outline the steps here but you can get more details from our full summary bundle of The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY YOUR CONSTRAINT(S)

Identify your bottleneck resources (where capacity is less than or equal to the demand placed upon it). This is typically where work is piling up.

STEP 2: FIND WAYS TO EXPLOIT YOUR CONSTRAINT(S)

Start by finding ways to unlock capacity at the bottlenecks without additional investments (i.e. without buying new equipment or hiring new staff). In our complete book summary of The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, we explore some strategies to do so.

STEP 3: SUBORDINATE EVERYTHING TO THE CONSTRAINT(S)

Let the bottlenecks set the pace for the entire system. In our complete 12-page summary we elaborate on (a) why you should not match resource capacity exactly with market demand and (b) why you must allow the bottlenecks to dictate the pace for the whole system and have a buffer at the bottlenecks.

STEP 4: ELEVATE THE SYSTEM CONSTRAINT(S)

A bottleneck is broken once it’s wide enough to meet existing demand. If the constraint is still not broken after the first 3 steps, then it’s time to elevate it by investing extra resources to boost the bottleneck’s capacity.

STEP 5: REPEAT FOR NEW CONSTRAINTS

Once a bottleneck is broken you should move on to the next bottleneck and repeat the process from step 1. This includes reviewing all measures that were put in place earlier, as they may no longer be relevant.

In the story, the original bottlenecks were 2 machines in the manufacturing process and poor use/prioritization of resources, leading to a backlog of customer orders.  Once this choke point was addressed, the next constraint was actually sales–the team had to find ways to help bring in more sales to use the excess capacity in the plant. In the full summary we share how Al’s team improved profitability and turnaround time by reducing batch sizes and tailoring their processes to clinch more sales and open up new markets.

Other Details in Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal

In our full summary, we share how Al’s team improved profitability and turnaround time by reducing batch sizes and tailoring their processes to clinch more sales and open up new markets.

Applying The Process of Ongoing Improvement

Although the 5-step process above can work in any organization, the exact details and application must be tailored to the specific circumstances and challenges in your organization.

The constraints that you face may not always be physical. There could also be intangible constraints, such as attitudes and deeply-entrenched practices from long-standing policies and procedures. Goldratt used the story to illustrate how factors like accounting principles, silos (different departments focusing on their own goals rather than the big picture), and metrics and data, can all affect the way resources are allocated and what people focus on. You can also get a detailed overview from our complete summary bundle.

The Art of Problem-Solving and Management

In the story, Jonah also used the Socratic approach to help Al’s team to challenge their assumptions, find solutions and develop critical thinking skills. In our complete summary, we touch on how this approach works and why it’s critical to effective management.

Other Details in The Goal

Ready to build a real competitive advantage with continuous improvement? To get more details, tips and examples on management and planning, do get our complete summary bundle which includes a one-page infographic summary in pdf, a 12-page text summary in pdf, and a 23-min audio summary in mp3.

The Goal summary - book summary bundle

The TOC was introduced in 1984 in the first edition of this book. This third edition of the book was published 25 years later, with additional Q&As and an article (“Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”) to discuss the relevance of TOC today and how it compares against other methods such as Six Sigma and LEAN. You can purchase the book here.

If you enjoyed this summary, you may also enjoy The Phoenix Project summary and The DevOps Handbook summary.

About the Authors of The Goal

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement is written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947-2011) was an Israeli business consultant and author best known for his Theory of Constraints (TOC), and various TOC derived tools such as the Optimized Production Technique, the Thinking Processes, and Critical Chain Project Management.

This book was co-authored with Jeff Cox, a best selling author and coauthor of multiple management-oriented novels.

The Goal Quotes

“Productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal…(so) productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is.”

“The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money….everything else we do is a means to achieve the goal.”

“We’re a team. And the team does not arrive in camp until all of us arrive in camp.”

“A measurement not clearly defined is worse than useless.”

“We want to make production a dominant force in getting good sales. Sales which will fit both the client’s needs and the plant’s capabilities like a glove.”

“The fundamental concepts are generic; the application is the translation of the concepts for a specific environment.”

Click here to download The Goal summary & infographic

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