Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes

The entire bottleneck concept is not geared to decrease operating expense, it's focused on increasing throughput.

bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that

Can I assume that making people work and making money are the same thing?

Make the bottlenecks work only on what will contribute to throughput today ... not nine months from now. That's one way to increase capacity at the bottlenecks. The other way you increase bottleneck capacity is to take some of the load off the bottlenecks and give it to non-bottlenecks.

STEP 1. Identify the system's bottlenecks. (After all it wasn't too difficult to identify the oven and the NCX10 as the bottlenecks of the plant.)
STEP 2. Decide how to exploit the bottlenecks. (That was fun. Realizing that those machines should not take a lunch break, etc.)
STEP 3. Subordinate everything else to the above decision. (Making sure that everything marches to the tune of the constraints. The red and green tags.)
STEP 4. Elevate the system's bottlenecks. (Bringing back the old Zmegma, switching back to old, less "effective" routings. . . .)
STEP 5. If, in a previous step, a bottleneck has been broken go back to step 1.

If we reduce batch sizes by half, we also reduce by half the time it will take to process a batch. That means we reduce queue and wait by half as well. Reduce those by half, and we reduce by about half the total time parts spend in the plant. Reduce the time parts spend in the plant and our total lead time condenses. And with faster turn-around on orders, customers get their orders faster.

Tell me how you measure me and I'll tell you how I will behave.

I smile and start to count on my fingers: One, people are good. Two, every conflict can be removed. Three, every situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, is exceedingly simple. Four, every situation can be substantially improved; even the sky is not the limit. Five, every person can reach a full life. Six, there is always a win-win solution. Shall I continue to count?

I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory.

Cost Accounting is enemy number one of productivity.

For the ability to answer three simple questions: 'what to change?', 'what to change to?', and 'how to cause the change?' Basically what we are asking for is the most fundamental abilities one would expect from a manager.

While they go get the others, I figure out the details. The system I've set up is intended to process' matches. It does this by moving a quantity of match sticks out of their box, and through each of the bowls in succession. The dice determine how many matches can be moved from one bowl to the next. The dice represent the capacity of each resource, each bowl; the set of bowls are my dependent events, my stages of production. Each has exactly the same capacity as the others, but its actual yield will fluctuate somewhat.

An expert is not someone who gives you the answer, it is someone who asks you the right question.

I write down the three measurements which Lou and I agreed are central to knowing if the company is making money: net profit, ROI and cash flow.

Four: Too many wasteful 'synchronization' meetings interrupted the actual work.

Bob comes into the office with a smear of grease on his white shirt over the bulge of his beer gut, and he's talking nonstop about what's going on with the breakdown of the automatic testing machines. "Bob," I tell him, "forget about that for now.

An hour saved at the non-bottleneck is a mirage.

More importantly, our software worked. I don't just mean that it didn't bump, or that it performed according to the written specifications, or that it was efficient in producing reports. It really worked

So this is the goal: To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.