Essay About Goal Of A Plant Manager And Various Operations

Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
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The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt examines the life of an American plant manger in his
quest to find out what exactly the goal of a plant manager is and how to go about
reaching
this goal. Along the way towards realizing the goal, the plant manager is forced define
and understand the theory of constraints. It is important to understand the theory of
constraints for the manager to be able to identify what restrictions are being opposed
onto
his various operations and to know how to reverse their affects. In this particular case
takes the manager having to continually deal with orders being finished late and
therefore
unsatisfied customers and an irate employer in order to realize that serious problems
occurring within his plant.Once the goal, which inevitably turns out to be money, is
found, it is imperative to figure out how to express the goal in the form of a
measurement.
Three measurements are able to not only express the goal of making money, but also
make it possible for the manager to develop operational rules for running his plant.
These
measurements are: throughput, inventory, and operational expense, and everything that
the manager manages in his plant is covered by them. Still, the manager must do much
thinking and research in order to figure out just how to express his goal in terms of
these
measurement.In addition to expressing the goal, the manager is troubled by whether
employees, robots, and machinery actuall need to be running at all times. At first
glance
many managers seem to think that an idle worker is an unproductive worker, but Goldratt
shows us that in reality a plant in which everyone is working all the time is very
inefficient. The manager in the book soon comes to realize that machines dont run
themselves — it takes people to create excess inventory, so sometimes when a worker is
taking a break, thereby leaving a machine idle, its actually a good thing.One huge
problem that often arises in a plant such as the one Goldratt has lead us through is
distinguishing between two resources. One is the bottleneck which is when many
operations are feeding their output into one operation whose capacity is less than the
combined capacities of the operations that provide input, leaving units to queue up
while
waiting to be processed. If bottlenecks can be improved then productivity will increase
until the output rate of the bottleneck is equal to that of the output rate of the
operations
feeding it. The second resource is the non-bottleneck which is any resource whose
capacity is greater than the demand placed on it. In the Goal it can be seen that the
main
problem for the plant manager is the bottleneck and how to make the flow through the
bottleneck only slightly less than demand.First and foremost, every manager and future
manager should definitely
sit down and read this book. Even if it does not of
characteristics of a particular plant, the basic concepts that The Goal discusses can be
help to nearly every manager of any kind of business. Learning to deal with such things
has bottlenecks, excess inventories, and the theory of constraints is something that
many
managers struggle with. Also, Goldratt teaches that, contrary to the belief of nearly
every
manager in the world, capacity should never be completely
************** them the quickest and and the lowest cost. The engineering department