Operations and constraints
The Goal
A factory novel that teaches the Theory of Constraints: a system’s output is set by its bottleneck, so improve the constraint, not everything.
Key concepts
- The goal of a business is to make money, measured by throughput, inventory and operating expense
- Every system has one constraint that limits output; an hour lost at the bottleneck is an hour lost for the whole system
- Five focusing steps: identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, repeat
- Local efficiencies everywhere else often make the system worse (excess inventory)
- Drum-buffer-rope: pace the system to the constraint
How I use it
I read The Goal in 2020 and finished it in two weeks. It didn’t teach me something new so much as name what I’d been doing my whole career: finding the one constraint, then fixing it so I never have to deal with it again. A spreadsheet, a rule, a hire, a team set-up, my own finances: the question is always the same.
The clearest case for me was at Babylon. My analytics team had become the bottleneck: every question in the business queued up behind us. The fix wasn’t more analysts. It was a stack that let people serve themselves, and then teaching them to work with us as collaborators instead of as clients. Once that constraint went, the whole system sped up.