Process Improvement — Work Smarter, Not Harder

Complex Manufacturing

Goldratt highlights that today’s manufacturing process is anything but a simple, first-order system. Perhaps, in the good old days of mass manufacturing and building to inventory—where a print run of, say, 500,000 units lasted several days—manufacturing was closer to the simple end of the spectrum. Controlling such a system to make more money was somewhat like setting a speed target in your car and adjusting the gas pedal as needed (faster = more gas, slower = less gas). There are minimal information and basic leadership skills required to optimize such a simple system. No one ever got fired for keeping operators busy running their machines.