VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [115]
Amy was at the head of the table, in the position of the penny vendor, representing raw materials. Wayne was to her right, with Sarah to his right. Murphy Maguire sat opposite Amy at the far end of the table. To Murphy’s right was Garth, then Elaine in the final position. Tom took a chair from the kitchen and squeezed between Amy and Elaine at the corner of the table. With pen in hand, he would keep score on the tally sheets.
“In this first round,” Tom said, “we are going to simulate a balanced processing line.”
And he explained the rules, which were the same as when Amy and her kids and her parents had played months before: everyone had one die and four pennies to start. Everything was “level.” Each person, however, could only move the number of pennies rolled with the die, and only if there was a sufficient number of pennies in queue in front of that person. A roll of six, in which only four pennies were in queue, meant that only four could be moved to the next person, and so on.
The targeted expectation for output was sixty-five pennies. This was to allow some slack below the seventy-cent average of three-point-five extended over twenty turns.
They played those twenty turns. The pennies crossing the finish line as Elaine’s long white fingers with their red-painted nails swept them into the clear, numbering at the end: forty-six. The inventory of pennies in process had nearly doubled by then from twenty cents to thirty-nine. Clearly, this was below expectations with respect to output and far above with respect to the symbolic investment in penny inventory.
“Should we play it again?” asked Amy, looking at Wayne. “Maybe we can do better next time? Maybe we can meet the sixty-five-cent target?”
“I don’t see what the point is,” said Wayne. “I mean, yes, I am a little surprised we didn’t come closer to achieving the average. But clearly the expectations were too high. We should have been shooting for what we can actually deliver, not some pie-in-the-sky number.”
“Suppose that sixty-five represents the actual market demand,” said Amy. “Now what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to commit to the number I can actually reach,” Wayne asserted.
“And give up a third of the market that’s there for the taking?” asked Amy. “Fine, Wayne. You go to Nigel Furst and tell him that. I’m sure he’ll be very understanding.”
“Now wait a minute!” Wayne protested. “The rules are against us. We’re always hamstrung with the lower number. Either the inventory isn’t available, or the ability to process isn’t what it should be. The whole idea of Lean –”
“We’re not demonstrating Lean,” said Tom, “we’re simulating a balanced line.”
“But you’re using dice! A one to six spread! That is variation!” Wayne complained.
A deep chuckle emerged from Murphy at the end of the table, after which he said, “Hey, I am here to tell you that there have been months when I would have been happy with that range of variability. I have seen it all: material not showing up because vendors went bankrupt. Skilled people in the hospital. Lightning strikes blowing out transformers. Equipment overheating and catching fire. And then the mere everyday randomness!”
“Wayne, let me tell you,” said Tom, “we could eliminate the dice in this simulation. If you had enough people – twenty or thirty – all just passing pennies from one to the next, you would still have variation. You’d have people screwing up and passing three pennies or two instead of four, then the next person trying to cope with five or six on the following turn, and on down the line. You would end up with waves, not a smooth flow.
“Then think about each person having to actually do a processing step. Like one person has to turn the pennies heads up, and the next make them all tails up, and the next in a square, and the one after – I don’t know – put them all in line with one finger’s width between. Whatever. Think of all the fluctuations that would