VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [145]
The fixed-time-interval inventory system, based on a reliable time to replenish what had been consumed by actual demand, was in place. Advocated by Murphy Maguire, modeled and implemented by Jayro Pepps, and perfected by Wayne Reese and his Highboro staff, it had pronounced effect on both operations and finance. Inventory stocks were high enough to protect production – and Godzilla, the Drum, in particular – but low enough that the cash required to maintain them was way less than it had been. Depending on the material, the reduction averaged about 30 percent – and Wayne was working to further improve this on some of the more expensive materials. In times when credit became pricey and even difficult to obtain at all for other businesses, this would prove to be a tremendous advantage.
At Formulation & Design, under Sarah Schwick’s direction, the relay-runner work ethic meant faster flow. There was far less “pacing” as people, for whatever reasons, sought to stretch their workloads, and the hoarding of tasks for individual aggrandizement was severely frowned upon. In principle, the single-tasking discipline was similar to what was done in production at Oakton, but the simple priority system that Sarah had put in place enabled flexibility. At first the priorities were set mainly to speed design clearances to enable production. But Sarah then improved upon the system so that there was a prioritized pipeline of projects that were gated to the F&D work staff in a way that would limit concurrent demand for critical resources during the same window of time. The sequencing allowed projects that were coming due sooner to have priority over others in which time to report to the client was more ample.
And she now had a free hand to do what she had long thought was necessary, which was “fixing the loop.” However, she and her people at F&D did it not the way she would have done it a few years before – fiddling with this, and tinkering with that – but by establishing Joe Tassoni and the other analysts as the Drum of F&D and then buffering whatever would serve them best so that it would be in queue when they got to it. They had worked hard to be sure that when an analyst opened a project folder, everything the analyst needed to render an evaluation was right there. The analyst then did not have to send the project back into the labs for some missing test or a faulty array of data. As promised, they had removed from the analysts’ duties anything that an analyst did not have to perform. All of this combined meant that the analysts became several times more productive than they had been, even as the quality of their work improved due to fewer distractions, better input, and more time to focus on what was important.
Then in the second half of the year, Sarah found a rainmaker – a replacement for Viktor Kyzanski. He was Dr. Marvin Crest, a brilliant and distinguished scientist, and a failed entrepreneur. A small company he had founded had gone under, and he had taken refuge in academia. But Dr. Marv, as he soon became known informally, not only knew his science, he also knew how to close a sale.
Amy Cieolara gave Dr. Marv the title of president of Formulation & Design, as this was practically a requirement for dealing one on one with higher management in other organizations. But Amy kept Sarah Schwick as the operational head of F&D, and gave Sarah the title of director.