bottleneck is at the front of production.'
'My question,' Lou says, 'is what happens if our resource with the least capacity in fact has a capacity greater than what market demand calls for?'
'Then I guess we'd have something like a bottle without a neck,' I say.
'But there would still be limits,' says Stacey. 'The bottle would still have walls. But they'd be greater than the market de- mand.'
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'And if that's the case?' asks Lou.
'I don't know,' I tell him. 'I guess the first thing to do is find out if we've got a bottleneck.'
'So we go look for Herbie,' says Ralph. 'If he's out there.' 'Yeah, quick, before we talk ourselves to death,' says Bob.
I walk into the conference room a few days later and there's paper everywhere. The main table is covered with computer print-outs and binders. Over in the corner, a data terminal has been installed; next to it, a printer is churning out even more paper. The wastebaskets are full. So are all the ashtrays. The litter of white styrofoam coffee cups, empty sugar packets and creamer containers, napkins, candy bar and cracker wrappers, and so on is scattered about. What has happened is the place has been turned into our headquarters in the search for Herbie. We have not found him yet. And we're getting tired.
Sitting at the far end of the main table is Ralph Nakamura. He and his data processing people, and the system data base they manage, are essential to the search.
Ralph does not look happy as I come in. He's running his skinny fingers through his thinning black hair.
'This isn't the way it's supposed to be,' he's saying to Stacey and Bob.
'Ahh, perfect timing,' says Ralph when he sees me. 'Do you know what we just did?'
'You found Herbie?' I say.
Ralph says, 'No, we just spent two and a half hours calculat- ing the demand for machines that don't exist.'
'Why'd you do that?'
Ralph starts to sputter. Then Bob stops him.
'Wait, wait, wait a minute. Let me explain,' says Bob. 'What happened was they came across some routings which still listed some of the old milling machines as being part of the processing. We don't use them-'
'Not only don't we use them, just found out we sold them a year ago,' says Ralph.
'Everybody down in that department knows those machines aren't there anymore, so it's never been a problem,' says Bob.
So it goes. We're trying to calculate demand for every re- source, every piece of equipment, in the plant. Jonah had said a bottleneck is any resource which is equal to or less than the mar-
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ket demand placed on it. To find out if we've got one then, we concluded we first would have to know the total market demand for products coming out of this plant. And, second, we would have to find out how much time each resource has to contribute toward filling the demand. If the number of available hours for production (discounting maintenance time for machines, lunch and breaks for people, and so on) for the resource is equal to or less than the hours demanded, then we know we've found our Herbie.
Getting a fix on the total market demand is a matter of pull- ing together data which we have on hand anyway-the existing backlog of customer orders, and the forecast for new product and spare parts. It's the complete product mix for the entire plant, including what we 'sell' to other plants and divisions in the com- pany.
Having done that, we're now in the process of calculating the hours each 'work center' has to contribute. We're defining a work center as any group of the same resources. Ten welders with the same skills constitute a work center. Four identical machines constitute another. The four machinists who set up and run the machines are still another, and so on. Dividing the total of work center hours needed, by the number of resources in it, gives us the relative effort per resource, a standard we can use for com- parison.
Yesterday, for instance, we found the demand for injection molding machines is about 260 hours a month for all the injec- tion molded parts that they have to process. The available time for those machines is about 280 hours per month, per resource. So that means we still have reserve capacity on those machines.
But the more we get into this, the more we're finding that the accuracy of our data is less than perfect. We're coming up with bills of material that don't match the routings, routings that don't have the current run-times-or the correct machines, as we just found out-and so on.
'The problem is, we've been under the gun so much that a lot of the updating has just fallen by the wayside,' says Stacey.
'Hell, with engineering changes, shifting labor around, and all that happening all the time, it's just plain tough to keep up with it no matter what,' says Bob.
Ralph shakes his head. 'To double-check and update every piece of data relevant to this plant could take months!'
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'Or years,' mumbles Bob.
I sit down and close my eyes for a second. When I open my eyes, they're all looking at me.
'Obviously, we're not g ing to have time for that,' I say. 'We've only got ten weeks now to make something happen be- fore Peach blows the whistle. I know we're on the right track, but we're still just limping along here. We've got to accept the fact we're not going to have perfect data to work with.'
Ralph says, 'Then I have to remind you of the old data processing aphorism: Garbage in, garbage out.'
'Wait a minute,' I say. 'Maybe we're being a little too methodical. Searching a data base isn't the only way to find an- swers. Can't we come up with some other faster way to isolate the bottleneck-or at least identify the candidates? When I think back to the model of the boys on the hike, it was obvious who the slower kids were on the trail. Doesn't anybody have any hunches where the Herbie might be in the plant?'
'But we don't even know if we've got one yet,' says Stacey.
Bob has his hands on his hips. His mouth is half open as if he might say something. Finally, he does.
'Hell, I've been at this plant for more than twenty years. After that much time, I know where the problems usually seem to start,' he says. 'I think I could put together a list of areas where we might be short on capacity; at least that would narrow the focus for us. It might save some time.'
Stacey turns to him. 'You know, you just gave me an idea. If we talk to the expediters. They could probably tell us which parts they're missing most of the time, and in which departments they usually go to look for'them.'
'What good is that going to do?' asks Ralph.
'The parts most frequently in short supply are probably the ones that would pass through a bottleneck,' she says. 'And the department where the expeditors go to look for them is probably where we'll find our Herbie.'
I sit up in my seat. 'Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.'
