The Goal

Throughput is going up as marketing spreads the word about us to other customers. Inventories are a fraction of what they were and still falling. With more business and more parts over which to spread the costs, operating expense is down. We're making money.

The following week, I'm away from the plant for two days with my personnel manager, Scott Dolin. We're at an off-site, very confidential meeting in St. Louis with the division's labor rela- tions group and the other plant managers. Most of the discussion is about winning wage concessions from the various unions. It's a frustrating session for me-at Bearington, we don't particularly need to lower wages. So I'm less than enthusiastic about much of the strategy suggested, knowing it could lead to problems with the union, which could lead to a strike, which could kill the prog- ress we've been making with customers. Aside from all that, the meeting is poorly run and ends with very little decided. I return to Bearington.

About four in the afternoon, I walk through the doors of the office building. The receptionist flags me down as I pass. She tells me Bob Donovan has asked to see me the moment I arrive. I have Bob paged and he comes hurrying into my office a few minutes later.

'What's up, Bob?' I ask.

'Hilton Symth,' he says. 'He was here in the plant today.'

'He was here?' I ask. 'Why?'

Bob shakes his head and says, 'Remember the videotape about robots that was in the works a couple of months ago?'

'That was killed,' I say.

'Well, it was reincarnated,' says Bob. 'Only now it's Hilton, because he's productivity manager for the division, doing the speech instead of Granby. I was having a cup of coffee out of the machine over by C-aisle this morning when I see this T.V. crew

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come trooping along. By the time I found out what they were doing here, Hilton Smyth is standing at my elbow.'

'Didn't anybody here know they were coming?' I ask.

He tells me Barbara Penn, our employee communicator, knew about it.

'And she didn't think to tell anybody?' I say.

'See, the whole thing was re-scheduled on short notice,' says Bob. 'Since you and Scott weren't around, she went ahead on her own, cleared it with the union, and made all the arrange- ments. She sent around a memo, but nobody got a copy until this morning.'

'Nothing like initiative,' I mutter.

He goes on to tell me about how Hilton's crew proceeded to set up in front of one of the robots-not the welding types, but another kind of robot which stacks materials. It soon became ob- vious there was a problem, however: the robot didn't have any- thing to do. There was no inventory for it, and no work on its way.

In a videotape about productivity, the robot, of course, could not simply sit there in the background and do nothing. It had to be producing. So for an hour, Donovan and a couple of assistants searched every corner of the plant for something the robot could manipulate. Meanwhile, Smyth became bored with the wait, so he started wandering around, and it wasn't long before he noticed a few things.

'When we got back with the materials, Hilton started asking all kinds of things about our batch sizes,' says Bob. 'I didn't know what to tell him, because I wasn't sure what you've said up at headquarters and, uh... well, I just thought you ought to know.'

I feel my stomach twisting. Just then the phone rings. I pick it up at my desk. It's Ethan Frost at headquarters. He tells me he's just had a talk with Hilton Smyth. I excuse myself to Bob, and he leaves. When he's gone and the door is shut, I talk to Frost for a couple of minutes and afterwards go down to see Lou.

I walk though the door and start to tap dance.

Two days later, an audit team from headquarters arrives at the plant. The team is headed by the division's assistant control- ler, Neil Cravitz, a fiftyish man who has the most bone-crushing handshake and the most humorless stare of anyone I've ever met.

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They march in and take over the conference room. In hardly any time at all, they've found we changed the base for determining the cost of products.

'This is highly irregular,' says Cravitz, peering at us over the tops of his glasses as he looks up from the spreadsheets.

Lou stammers that, okay, maybe it wasn't exactly according to policy, but we had valid reasons for basing costs on a current two-month period.

I added, 'It's actually a more truthful representation this

way,'

'Sorry, Mr. Rogo,' says Cravitz. 'We have to observe stan- dard policy.'

'But the plant is different now!'

Around the table, all five accountants are frowning at Lou and me. I finally shake my head. There is no sense attempting to appeal to them. All they know are their accounting standards.

The audit team recalculates the numbers, and it now looks as if our costs have gone up. When they leave, I try to head them off by calling Peach before they can return, but Peach is unexpect- edly out of town. I try Frost, but he's gone too. One of the secre- taries offers to put me through to Smyth, who seems to be the only manager in the offices, but I ungracefully decline.

For a week, I wait for the blast from headquarters. But it never comes. Lou gets a rebuke from Frost in the form of a memo warning him to stick to approved policy, and a formal order to redo our quarterly report according to the old cost standards and to submit it before the review. From Peach, there is nothing.

I'm in the middle of a meeting with Lou over our revised monthly report early one afternoon. I'm crestfallen. With the numbers based on the old cost factor, we're not going to make our fifteen percent. We're only going to record a 12.8 percent increase on the bottom line, not the seventeen percent Lou origi- nally calculated.

'Lou, can't we massage this a little more?' I'm pleading.

He shakes his head. 'From now on, Frost is going to be scru- tinizing everything we submit. I can't do any better than what you see now.'

Just then I become aware of this sound outside the offices that's getting louder and louder.

Wuppa- wuppa-wuppa-wuppa-wuppa-wuppa-wuppa-wuppa.

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I look at Lou and he looks at me.

'Is that a helicopter?' I ask.

Lou goes to the window and looks out.

'Sure is, and it's landing on our lawn!' he says.

I get to the window just as it touches down. Dust and brown grass clippings are whirling in the prop wash around this sleek red and white helicopter. With the blades still twirling down to a stop, the door opens and two men get out.

'That first one looks like Johnny Jons,' says Lou.

'It is Johnny Jons,' I say.

'Who's the other guy?' asks Lou.

I'm not sure. I watch them cross the lawn and start to walk through the parking lot. Something about the girth