VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [152]
So the four of them met soon after the photo made its rounds. Kurt laid out his case. The technical merits of the proposed Baby ’Zilla were good. It would not do all of the exotic and proprietary things that the larger Godzilla would do, but as an auxiliary, it was acceptable. The price, too, was a bargain. Yet Murphy was reluctant to give the green light.
“Come on, Murph! What’s wrong with some extra capacity on the Drum?” Wayne asked. “You say we need protective capacity everywhere else; why not add to Autoclave?”
“I’m not absolutely saying, no,” said Murphy. “But I am asking, what is the effect on the system going to be? We definitely know that buying this equipment is going to add to investment, and if we use it, it’s going to increase operating expense. What is it going to do to throughput?”
“Obviously,” said Kurt, “it should increase throughput.”
“Why?”
“Autoclave can process more!”
“So you are planning to use the Baby ’Zilla?” asked Murphy.
“Duh?! Yeah! Of course we’re going to use it!” said Kurt.
“Well, that’s what concerns me,” said Murphy.
Amy jumped in at this point, saying, “Garth Quincy has been telling me that the marketing-sales injections we came up with are having the desired effect – even in what appears to be a softening marketplace. Don’t we need to increase the capacity on the system constraint – the Drum – in order to reap the benefits of those new sales? And if we don’t, aren’t we going to risk disaster if we can’t deliver on those commitments?”
Murphy nodded, and said, “Yes. There is a risk. No question. However, there is also a risk if we add capacity to the Drum to the extent that Godzilla is no longer the system constraint.”
Kurt was now confused and frustrated.
“All right. Time out,” Kurt said. “Pardon me, but I don’t get it. We want growth, right? So we need to elevate the system constraint to accommodate the growth. At some point, yes, there is enough capacity in Autoclave that Godzilla is no longer the system constraint. I’ve got that much. Isn’t that necessary and good? Shouldn’t we be trying to do that?”
“Let me tell you a little story,” said Murphy. “Back in the days of yesteryear, when B. Don was president, we both read that book called The Goal, and we figured out a plan. In those days, like most people, we thought that constraints were fundamentally bad. They had to be recognized, but then they had to be eliminated. And we realized that if we did that and continued to push production, a new constraint or bottleneck would occur.
“Now, in The Goal, there is a Boy Scout hike that is an analogy for a system with a purpose to achieve. And there is a chubby kid named Herbie who is the bottleneck to the progress of the Scout troop trying to reach its campsite for the evening, because Herbie is the slowest kid and determines the speed of the hike. Anyway, B. Don and I came up with a strategy called Herbie-busting. We would elevate the constraint, and as a result the Herbie would move somewhere else. And then we would bust open the new Herbie, and the system constraint would again move, and so on and so on.
“Well, every time we did that, undesirable things would happen. In those days, the Herbie – or the Drum as we say now – was not in Autoclave. Back then we had four other autoclaves in addition to Godzilla. And we would stagger the processing so that one autoclave would be being emptied while another was being filled and the others were running. The Herbie at that time was in Coatings. So, we go in and we add capacity to Coatings, ramp up production, and the production constraint then shifted to Lamination. What did we do? The same thing. We added some dandy new equipment to Lamination, ramped up again, and then the constraint went to Final – and so on.
“Each time we busted the Herbie, we gave ourselves problems. There was confusion on the floor, and in scheduling, and even between B. Don and me. And there was a always a period of chaos until