First and foremost, this is the best business related novel I have read thus far. As a senior engineering student I spend a great deal of time with my nose in textbooks studying production system bottlenecks along with countless other production issues. Needless to say that the authors of these textbooks do not consider the dryness of the technical material a detraction, its engineering after all. In contrast, The Goal deals with many of the same issues my fellow classmates and I grapple with in an appealing and engaging approach. The way the author, E. Goldratt, weaves an interesting back story of a troubled engineer turned manager with an astute evaluation of complex production issues brings to life the dead equations and theory in our textbooks.
There are several cleaver analogies the author uses to explain the theory of constraints to the reader who may not be an engineer. The Boy Scout story involves a troupe out on a hike that seems to keep falling behind schedule and getting separated. The main character and troubled engineer, Alex Rogo, is the troupe leader and decides to solve the disorganization problem by conducting a few experiments. He finds that a plump scout named Herby is holding everyone back as he is the slowest hiker, then compares this situation with a production system and thus a bottleneck is explained.
The matchstick game is also a practical, basic explanation of constraints. The experiment sets up some scouts in a row, each with a bowl. They are to roll a die and pass the number of matchsticks prescribed by the die to the next scout down the line. If the number on the die is greater than the number of matchsticks they have in their bowl they are to pass their entire matchstick inventory to the next scout. Although each boy has the capacity to roll a 6 every time on his turn, statistically this is nearly impossible. This experiment demonstrates the variation production cells naturally experience and how this variation affects the next production center down the line.
There are some interesting characters that seem completely out of place in the story. One such character is Jonah, which is Alex's old college physics professor turned business consultant. As Alex's troubles mount Jonah becomes his professor once again, and like most college professors, only gives Alex enough information to solve the problem on his own. It is interesting that the Goldratt is himself a physicist turned business consultant. I would venture to say that the relationship between Jonah and Alex in the book is representative of the author and reader relationship; an expert advising a novice. Another reason Goldratt may have made Jonah a physicist was to lend an air of scientific method to business problem solving.
The book also provides some practical, simple tricks to deal with production problems. One of these is to relocate an in-process inspection operation before a bottleneck station to off-load production demand through it. I could go into all the technical issues dealt with in the book such as: how to increase throughput, reduce inventory and operating expenses, how to deal with changing bottlenecks, and the like but there are textbooks that better deal with that sort of thing.
It is worth mentioning that there are some really interesting production system modeling software packages out there, such as Arena, which can mimic production systems very well and facilitate system experimentation to solve throughput problems.
I sincerely wish that I had this book imbedded somewhere in my required reading list in my first year engineering courses, it would have made all those long hours of textbook work seem a little more relevant.
Michael Magallon
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Bestseller mondiale publié en 20 langues et 3 millions d'exemplaires
Reviewed in France on May 7, 2012