VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [129]
He lifted the lid on the kettle and wafted some of the aroma toward Jayro with the back of his hand.
“Oh my. What is that?”
“Osso buco,” said Murphy.
“Huh?! Osso what?”
“Veal shank. Braised Eye-talian veal shank. Learned it from one of the Geniuses up in Maryland, a gen-u-wine Eye-talian by the name of Joe Tassoni,” said Murphy.
“You mentioned him,” said Jayro. “He’s the bottleneck in Rockville.”
“Not just him personally,” said Murphy, “but Joe and all the other analysts. Looks like something may actually be done about that, however, and Oakton might just start getting a steady flow of clearances.”
“All right, these beauties are done,” said Jayro, shutting off the torch. “Let’s eat.”
They ate quietly for a few minutes, the only utterances passing between them being the murmurs of appreciation for the goodness of what they were eating. Murphy at one point looked around the drab, windowless room and realized how much he had missed these lunches.
“So, from your standpoint, how are we doing?” Murphy asked.
Jayro let out a sigh of frustration, and said, “I’ve got more headaches than I got aspirin to make them go away.”
“How so?” asked Murphy. “Bring me up to date.”
“I think that when you left,” said Jayro, “we were putting the kanbans in place.”
“Kanban. Why don’t they just call it the card system? That’s all kanban means. It’s a Japanese word for ‘card,’” Murphy grumbled.
“Well, it’s not usually a card anymore,” said Jayro. “It’s whatever signal triggers the order to replenish the material.”
“I know. I’m just being grumpy.”
“Anyway, we were putting the kanbans in place. And then Kurt wanted us to do POUS – you know what that is?”
“Point of Use Storage,” said Murphy.
“Right. So now we’ve got all these racks with bins for various parts and materials, placed right on the plant floor so that inventory is close at hand and the operator can just pull whatever is needed without having to go get it from storage, or wait for someone else to bring it.”
“Yes, I’ve seen what you’re talking about. So where’s your headache?”
“First of all,” said Jayro, “we don’t make just two or three kinds of widgets here; we make thousands of different kinds of widgets. We make widgets and bidgets and tidgets and every other idget that’s out there – standard and custom, too.”
“Yes, you don’t have to tell me that.”
“So with all that complexity –”
“Different racks,” Murphy concluded.
“Right! And they won’t all fit! There’s only so much space,” said Jayro. “Then Kurt got the idea to put casters on them, so that we can swap out the racks faster.”
Murphy rolled his eyes, and said, “That sounds like Kurt. Once that guy gets an idea in his head, he’s going to make it work no matter what.”
“Anyway, we’ve got all these racks being rolled in and rolled out – only the trouble is that there are times when an operator goes to pull materials, there’s nothing to pull. Some of the bins are empty.”
“Completely empty? Totally out of stock?”
“Yes, empty! Or not enough to run the order that we need to produce. I mean, usually it’s only a few bins, but it happens. Then we have to juggle the orders, and call up the vendors, get on the internet to find other sources, all that.”
“Now tell me something,” said Murphy, with a nice flaky chunk of trout on the end of his plastic fork, “whether it’s a kanban or whatever, it’s still a min-max kind of thing, right?”
“Right. When the quantity gets down to the min level – the minimum safety stock quantity – that triggers a buy signal and a replenishment order goes out.”
“Well, is somebody forgetting to reorder?” Murphy asked.
“Rarely. No, what’s been happening is that the reorder signal is sent, but the stuff – whatever it is – isn’t here when we need it.”
“And the reorder point is fixed? The same every time?”
“Uh-huh. Like let’s say the bin holds one hundred pieces at the max level, and fifty pieces is the min level. Once we use fifty of them, it triggers a reorder for another fifty to replace the fifty we’ve used. But sometimes we go through the remaining fifty before the new fifty