VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [151]
“Um, the trouble,” said Garth, “is that one of the major customers that insists on the long soak happens to be our good friend, the United States Navy.”
“Hmm. Yes, I’d say this is a dilemma,” said Amy. She thought for a moment, then concluded with, “Let’s do this: let’s revise or create a new standard that uses up less Godzilla time. And we will give anyone switching to the new standard a nice discount for some reasonable time. I will then personally talk to Admiral Jones and give him a heads-up. And I suspect it really won’t take an act of Congress to get the spec changed. If nothing happens, then we do have to raise the price. Because a full day of system time is phenomenally expensive.”
Injection: We install disincentives on products that have adverse effects on throughput, while offering alternatives of good value for customers accepting choices positive to increased throughput.
With the result that …
Customers get a bargain and our throughput increases.
20
For Wayne Reese, seeing was believing. What he saw over time, and concluded to be true, was that Lean – and Six Sigma – functioned better within the framework of Theory of Constraints than without it. This was because the tenets of TOC could quickly establish a stable system, which Lean and Six Sigma could then improve – but with a perspective derived from the system constraint. With that guiding, “true north” sort of perspective, there was a more meaningful context for deciding which points of the improvement compass mattered most. Lean and Six Sigma could then be – and were, under Wayne’s new handling – focused upon what would deliver the best system results. It was no longer a matter of eliminating waste for the sake of eliminating waste. It was no longer a matter of finding the “biggest” wastes, because without the concepts of a system constraint and the money-making measurement of throughput, it was hard or impossible to know what the biggest wastes truly were. It was a matter of looking at the system constraint, and what affected its output – which determined throughput, and thereby the operating profit of the company – and making the LSS choices based on what would yield the best results.
So while Murphy Maguire, Kurt Konani, and Jayro Pepps were working mainly from an agenda centered on Oakton, Wayne was working in concert with them, but rather from a concentric circle one magnitude larger. He was working on things outside the Oakton circle, like finished products storage and ordering – optimizing the replenishment of stocks so that orders for these would flow within the stream of custom composites. He was integrating the new web-based ordering so this new river of orders – well, more like a creek at first – would automatically take account of Godzilla’s processing abilities before promising a delivery date. And any number of other things in addition to merely dealing with the administration of the overall operations function.
One day, an email came to Wayne:
From: Kurt Konani
Subject: Baby ’Zilla
At the top of the message, Kurt had written the single line, “Isn’t it so cute!”
Below this was a photo of a decidedly uncute, perhaps anti-cute, ugly, cylindrical piece of industrial equipment. It was an autoclave, perhaps a third to half the size of Godzilla. As it turned out, some glass-products maker in Chattanooga was closing down and selling off its equipment, and the autoclave, which was fairly new and in good condition, was for sale. Below the photo, Kurt had listed the specs, and then asked the question:
“What do you think?”
Wayne picked up the phone. What Kurt wanted to do was install this second autoclave – “Baby ’Zilla” – next to the humungous Godzilla so as to add capacity to the Drum and system constraint. What could be wrong with that? But fearing that Murphy Maguire might cut off the discussion before it even got started, Kurt had sent the photo to his old ally, Wayne, first.
Of course, Wayne knew that Murphy ultimately would have to be included in the decision. And Amy Cieolara