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# The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

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The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement [Goldratt, Eliyahu M., Cox, Jeff] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Review: Put this book on your reading list ASAP - 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
Review: Industrial Engineering Class Read - I enjoyed this book even though it was a mandatory read for my introduction to Industrial Engineering class. It keeps you interested yet helps provide a more realistic story of how the everyday essentials of IE is used in the real world.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #643,889 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #160 in Organizational Change (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (573) |
| Dimensions  | 6.5 x 1.75 x 9.25 inches |
| Edition  | 3rd Revised |
| ISBN-10  | 0884271781 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0884271789 |
| Item Weight  | 1.46 pounds |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 384 pages |
| Publication date  | July 15, 2004 |
| Publisher  | North River Pr |

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Put this book on your reading list ASAP
*by M***N on June 5, 2010*

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

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Industrial Engineering Class Read
*by K***T on July 19, 2025*

I enjoyed this book even though it was a mandatory read for my introduction to Industrial Engineering class. It keeps you interested yet helps provide a more realistic story of how the everyday essentials of IE is used in the real world.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Quirky little book that was completely worth it...A personal review below
*by K***B on May 13, 2007*

TOC Overview Defying conventional opinion which says that books on business must be boring, Eli Goldratt introduced to the world his "Theory of Constraints" in this novel published in 1984. Highly readable, the book uses layman's terms to present an unorthodox approach to improving competitive advantage. The novel is written about a manufacturing plant, but its philosophy can be applied to any company that relies on a production process. The book has been called a "Socratic" novel because Goldratt uses a sort of teacher-student discourse method to explain his theories. Today, generally referred to as the TOC (Theory of Constraints) or constraint management, Goldratt's philosophy attempts to re-focus production processes on the single-most important goal common to all free-market business: making money. The TOC's greatest appeal is its logical simplicity. Like other operation improvement programs, Goldratt is also concerned with reducing waste and generating/sustaining competitive advantage. But Goldratt's perspective is different from other management systems because he approaches the problem with a clean slate. Leaving all traditional operations management jargon behind, Goldratt starts from scratch with both his definitions and his analysis. Nothing in The Goal requires an understanding of abstract business or economic theory. Everything has an immediate application, and Goldratt explains every concept using a real-life analogy. No doubt his background as a physicist contributes to this tendency. By his own admission, he thought of "science as nothing more than an understanding of the way the world is and why it is that way." Likewise, his exploration of an under-performing manufacturing plant in The Goal is a simple yet profound look at how a process works, and why. The TOC is based on three fundamental principles, and Eli's theory suggests that all companies which keep these premises in mind will make money: 1. The only reason that companies do anything is to make money. 2. Anything that a company does to speed up the processes that generate money is appropriate. 3. Each business operation is one big process with many sub-processes. The constraint theory is nested with these principles in that all sub-processes of the operation are defined by how much each one limits total production. The most limiting factors are identified hierarchically as constraints. If non-constraint aspects of the process (whether that be a machine or a worker) need to sit idle sometimes in order to match pace with the constraints, that's okay. In fact, it's a necessity or else excess inventory and higher work-in-progress (WIP) levels will result. Oftentimes, where operations, accounting, and marketing interface within a company presents a conflict of interest, and Goldratt's book contains several examples of this. Performance measurements such as machine productivity stats, for example, are sometimes meaningless indicators because they don't contribute or even correlate to the company's goal. Alex, the plant supervisor, begins to realize this fact when he tries to impress his mentor, Jonah, by telling him how his plant now uses robots at one of the process stations and productivity in that area improved by 36%. Jonah astutely responds by asking if any of the workers were laid off, or if the plant was selling any more products. Alex admits that neither of these had occurred, yet. Jonah then predicted, correctly, that Alex's plant had an excess inventory problem. Adding robots to a non-constraint area didn't increase overall production, it only increased WIP and total production time. As Goldratt illustrates through Alex's trials and triumphs at the plant, the most fundamental principle of TOC is that all processes must be subordinate to the ultimate goal of making money. The performance measurements of that goal are: 1. Net Profit - an absolute measurement in dollars 2. Return on Investment (ROI) - a relative measure based on investment 3. Cash Flow - a survival measurement Notice the absence of metrics such as station productivity or worker utilization. Goldratt helps managers mired in traditional thought re-vamp their definitions of performance indicators and the way managers look at making money. Goldratt makes use of three common terms, the correct understanding of which are key to comprehending any business process: throughput, inventory, and operating expenses. Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales (not the rate of production!). Throughput equals sales revenue minus direct materials cost - it measures the speed at which the company makes money. Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell, or the money currently inside the system. It is the raw materials value tied up in work in progress and unsold finished goods. Large amounts of inventory are undesirable because it means that the company has spent money for product that hasn't generated revenue yet. Put simply, inventory is money. Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. This is the money the company must pay out to make throughput happen. All costs of operations other than direct materials costs are operational expenses. The objective is not to reduce operational expense by itself, or improve one measurement in isolation. To achieve the goal, a company must "increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense." Contrary to previous thought on the subject, all production stations achieving max productivity, or all workers working all the time, is a sign that the business as a whole system may be running inefficiently. The sum is greater than its parts. Full utilization of any non-constraint will produce more work in progress than the constraint can handle. This is where TOC differentiates itself from other operations management systems such as TQM and Lean which focus on eliminating waste in every possible corner of the business, speeding up every process increasing "efficiencies". What the TOC does, by contrast, is attempt to increase total system efficiency. With this in mind, Goldratt details the "how" behind this theory using Five Focusing Steps. These steps should be followed in order by any business considering using the TOC in a way similar to how Alex did in the book. These steps accomplish incremental improvement to the overall operation. 1. Identify the system's constraint(s), and prioritize them according to importance. In this step, the "Herbies" of the plant are identified, so named after an analogy Goldratt uses in the book to explain how the whole operation is only as fast as it's slowest sub-process. The slowest boyscout, Herbie, causes a backlog of hikers on a narrow trail while the faster boys in front of him get further and further ahead. Herbie is a bottleneck. 2. Exploit the system's most critical constraint. In this step, the company looks for ways to get maximum output from the constraint, usually by proper scheduling and control so that the constraint station only works on good inputs. Waste of time and effort occurred in the book when the constraint spent valuable time working on production items that were scrapped by QC later down the line. 3. Subordinate everything else to that constraint. In this step, the whole operations is slowed down to the pace of the constraint. All operation improvement opportunities that would increase productivity of a non-constraint should not be invested in (like the expensive robots which only served to increase WIP inventory). 4. Elevate the system's constraints. Elevating the constraint means to find methods of increasing the capacity of the constraint, such as: a. Performing regular maintenance on the constraint to prevent breakdowns. b. Running the constraint for extra shifts. c. Automating the constraint. 5. Repeat steps 1-4, focusing on a different constraint. However, Goldratt says to be wary of allowing inertia to become the bottleneck itself. Constantly look for the next system constraint, break it, and repeat. (Goldratt, 1984) SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Strengths The most prominent strengths of Goldratt's philosophy, already discussed briefly, are that it's philosophy is simple and its approach to understanding the whole production system is intuitive, logical, and yet profound. However, the theory has been the topic of many optimistic reviews (even after twenty years) because it provides very immediate and positive results to companies. By nature, focusing on the weakest and most critical link in any production chain will generate the greatest amount of improvement in a short amount of time (Spector, 2006). Weaknesses One of the weaknesses, or difficulties, inherent to the Theory of Constraints is that multiple bottlenecks can occur within a plant, and sometimes bottlenecks manifest themselves at different workstations at different times, particularly in a balanced plant. Achieving an unbalanced plant is what many manufacturers should, but do not do. Balancing capacity across a sequence of processes; attempting to match capacity with market demand at each work station, is usually detrimental to the system as a whole. Goldratt uses the "match bowl" game to illustrate how floating bottlenecks can occur in a balanced plant. A series of bowls is set on a table (each one representing a station). Matches represent product inventory and one die is used to simulate statistical fluctuations (variation) in performance at each workstation. The bowls are a series of dependent events and each operation has the same capacity (six products per day, or six matches). Each player has a workstation (bowl), and rolls the die to determine how many matches he can take from the previous player's bowl (representing one day's production). On the next turn, each player rolls the die, and again he can only pick up as many matches as are in the previous player's bowl even if he rolled a higher number. The demonstration shows that in a series of dependent events, where each operation has the same amount of capacity (a "balanced" plant), the variation will cause the bottleneck to move from operation to operation (bowl to bowl). Goldratt knew this and combated it by suggesting a version of continuous improvement (see Step Five of the Focusing Steps). It's important to realize that balancing each workstation in isolation against max production will cause excess WIP inventory and bottlenecks. Another weakness/difficulty in implementing TOC is that it is often met with significant emotional resistance, especially by institutionalized business minds. It is difficult to introduce anything knew, especially a philosophy that seems counter-intuitive and unorthodox at the outset. In the book, Alex encounters this defense mechanism amongst his peers and superiors. Goldratt recommends using the Socratic method (the way Jonah does) to elicit the answers from people's own minds, rather than preaching the new methodology. All parts of an organization need to decide together on how best to proceed - if accounting, for example, is kept in the dark, they're likely to be even more hostile towards the new performance metrics. Opportunities The opportunities that TOC presents are exciting, especially when applied to old management accounting techniques. There are many accounting "truths" that Goldratt deconstructs quite effectively in his book (Hendricks, 2005). Traditionally, all sub-process improvements were seen as a good thing, but according to Goldratt, "improvement" expenses are wasted if they are spent on non-constraints. Also, another favorite accounting metric, station productivity, can actually lead the plant to make adjustment that detract from the total operating efficiency of the system (or plant). Threats The Theory of Constraints, when implemented, is often faced with both internal and external threats. Without everyone "on board," so to speak, it's all to easy to succumb to traditional thought and conventional practices. However, using some uncommon sense and logic in overcoming some of the more prevalent misconceptions is necessary in order to produce results, and ultimately, achieve the goal of making money. It's important to remember that the "TOC is not a panacea for everything. It's not going to solve cultural problems within an organization." Associated Concepts Goldratt introduced a new set of jargon to the world of operations management, not afraid to use some rather odd-sounding phrases (e.g., "Jonah," "Evaporating Cloud," or "Reality Tree"). Unfortunately in the early years of development, the Israeli physicist and his unorthodox (but successful) publication of the first business novel ever combined to create an aura of quirkiness amongst the managers who followed his philosophy. In an attempt to "de-cultize" the TOC, it is more commonly referred to as "constraint management." In recent years, constraint management has become a highly applicable business philosophy that can be applied to almost any profit or non-profit organization, and has even been successfully merged into Lean and SixSigma to amplify results. Potential Areas of Application The most successful applications of constraint management have occurred in highly competitive industries such as the low-cost airline business and the hardware technology production business. One example of this success is Seagate Technology LLC, a hard disk drive producer with 42,000 employees worldwide. The company experienced unprecedented results after adopting both Six Sigma and later, constraints management. After introducing SixSigma in 1998 and experiencing positive but plateaued results, Seagate's projects lacked the prioritization and the constraint focus that the TOC could, and did, provide. After superimposing the principles of constraint management on top of it's already-established system of SixSigma, the company increased production completion by 80%, and the number of projects completed in three months or less (half the time of the company's previous average of 6 months), was increased by 70% in just 90 days. Constraint management looks at the system as a whole, identifies limiting factors, and works to ensure a harmonious "team" operation of all workstations within the production line. Also called "synchronous manufacturing," (in contrast to the dated notion of a "balanced" plant), Goldratt's approach revolutionized the way operations managers and accountants work in unison to achieve the Goal.

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