VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [77]
Tom got to his feet.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Home,” he said calmly. “No, on second thought, I’m going to a little place I know, maybe bump into some old friends who like to have fun and will actually be in the same room with me when I talk to them. Good night.”
And Amy sat there stunned as he walked out the door.
“Tom!” she called.
By the time she got to the front porch, he was in the car. He made a somewhat noisy departure down the street, and was gone.
It had been their first real fight. It would not be their last.
On Monday, Amy did her best. She showed Wayne Reese the tally sheets from the two rounds of the dice game on Saturday night, one round with the balanced line and the other round with the constraint installed. She tried to explain what the results seemed to prove. But Wayne was unmoved.
“First of all – dice?” he asked. “A one-to-six variation? That’s high variability, Amy. What we’re striving for is no variability. Zero. Or a very small amount – not anything like what a roll of the dice would suggest. We want dice that always roll the same number.”
“Yes, but is that achievable?” asked Amy.
“We’re working on it.”
“Is it achievable this year?”
Wayne looked at her as if she had asked for the moon.
“No, of course not! But look at what we have been able to do,” he said. “Look at the M57 Line! Simply by reconfiguring the M57 Line we have been able to achieve a twelve percent reduction in cost and a twenty percent increase in throughput! And you can take that to the bank!”
“Can I?”
“Well, I didn’t mean literally,” he said.
“You say there’s a twenty percent increase in throughput? Why am I not seeing a twenty percent increase on the bottom line?”
“Because we have more work to do!” Wayne protested. “Our next target is going to be Final Prep, then probably Coatings, then Packaging and Shipping. I mean, we can’t do everything at once!”
“All right,” Amy said. “But you think we will have a significant improvement – with clear financial gains – later this year?”
“Yes, absolutely, I believe we will. I mean, it’s not entirely up to me or Oakton, but if the sales are there to support it, I think we’re going to have a blow-out fourth quarter. We’ll be capable of it anyway.”
“Really?” asked Amy. “Well, just the same, maybe I should throw out a few words of caution to Nigel.”
Wayne shook his head.
“Of course, it’s your call,” he told her, “but if I know Nigel, he’s not going to take kindly to your backing off. If he gets impatient and demands rigid cost controls, it might even jeopardize some of the progress we’re making on keeping the line balanced.”
Amy sighed and pressed her lips together as she felt the stress weigh on her.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But one more thing. Since we currently don’t have dice that always roll the same numbers, and there is variability, and there is interdependency and all of that – what about the need for a system constraint?”
“A system constraint?”
“Yes, like my, um, friend, Tom, says has to be there?”
For a second, Wayne was working to cover his amusement. Her, um, friend. Tom. The flyboy. Like he would know anything about manufacturing high-tech composite materials. Then Wayne sat back.
“Amy, you can relax. We’ve already thought of that. We’ve got it covered.”
“You do?”
“Yes, we’re going to be establishing a pacemaker on the M57 Line.”
“A pacemaker? What’s that?”
“It’s the same thing as a system constraint. That is, it accomplishes the same purpose. A pacemaker process does what it sounds like – it sets the pace for the entire value stream. It’s a single scheduling point for the entire system. Every piece of inventory above the pacemaker is pulled to it. Everything below in the value stream flows in a nice, smooth, level manner.”
Amy began to nod in agreement as she visualized what Wayne was talking about. Then a question came to mind.
“Why the M57 Line? Why should that determine scheduling? And anyway, I thought you were done with the M57,” she said.
“Kurt and I have had a lot of discussion on this. There is some question on where to locate