VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [114]
“I didn’t quite know how to say it,” said Sarah, “but, yes, I think that’s very much what happens.”
“So the analysts are a true bottleneck,” Murphy concluded, “but only intermittently and mainly with whatever work they don’t want to do. But let me tell you, that plays hell with trying to schedule production in a manufacturing plant.”
“Yes, but Murph, for years Oakton did well with on-time shipments and turned in very respectable numbers,” said Amy. “How did you do it back then?”
“Back in the good ole days? Well, I always did everything I could to be sure that Oakton had a healthy backlog of cleared design reviews,” said Murphy. “But if the backlog of approvals ran low, I would feed in some build-to-stock product refills – just to keep everybody in Highboro happy, so they didn’t think we’d all gone to the beach. And if the supply of approved build-to-order runs did not recover, then I would just get on the phone to B. Donald Williams, and B. Don would call Viktor, and Viktor would go and rattle the analysts’ cages, and lo and behold, a few days later a new batch of approvals would magically appear. It was all very informal – yet effective.”
Wayne was shaking his head; Elaine was shuddering; Garth was chuckling; and Sarah was looking amused and peeved at the same time.
“You know,” Sarah said to Murphy, “I was one of the ones in those cages.”
“Sorry,” said Murphy. “We all do what we must to get by!”
“And how is Oakton?” Amy asked him. “What is your assessment?”
“I must admit, in all honesty, that I am impressed with some of what has been accomplished in my absence,” said Murphy. “The M57 Line in particular, with its new configuration, is downright slick – not that that improvement or any of the others will provide the increase in throughput that we desperately need. Nevertheless, I think that Oakton can be made profitable, from an operating standpoint, in fairly short order. If, that is, we jettison the notion that the plant must have a balanced line.”
All eyes turned to Wayne.
“I thank you for the compliment,” he said to Murphy. “On the other hand, I’ve given everything we talked about last week a lot of thought, and I really do not think that we should give up on the balanced line just yet.”
“Just yet?” challenged Amy. “You think we should wait another year until everything is all that much worse? Or what?”
“No! Look, the main issue is variation! If we continue to work to reduce variation, everything should be fine!” Wayne argued.
And when skeptical or blank looks came from the others, he added:
“I just don’t think we should run away from everything that we’ve accomplished.”
“Well, in the interest of resolving this,” said Amy, “I have invited someone to join us today. Sort of a special guest.”
“Who?” asked Elaine.
“Nigel Furst,” Garth guessed.
“No, definitely not Nigel,” said Amy.
“Peter Winn,” suggested Sarah, as a joke.
“Oh, yeah, right,” said Amy. “As if Mr. Winn would deign to come to my house in Highboro. No, our mystery guest is known to some of you, but not to others. Let me see if he’s ready.”
She turned on her cell phone and pressed a speed-dial number.
“Hi, it’s me. Ten minutes? Great.”
By the time Tom Dawson arrived,