| The Goal | Global Supply Chain |

The Goal happens to be one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time .It’s a story about how Alex Rogo saves his plant using operations management techniques. It simplifies each concept very easily that everyone can understand. Plus it’s a very aspirational book about how to survive in a crisis situation. There are a few aspects of the book which stood out in my mind 1) bottleneck concept 2) Balance your personal and work life 3) Communication with all employees and making every process simple and easy for all to understanding finally 4) the blessing of having a good experienced staff .
Even though I've read about bottleneck in my operations management class but still the concept of was never clear to me. But this book gave a very clear idea to me about what does this term means, especially with the help of real life problems included. How should you manage all the equipment’s process time in such a manner that you don't waste alot of time. Inventory problem is also very common issue in almost all types of organizations, ideally inventory should be kept to a minimum. The reason for that is it wastes money. As we see the same problem happening in the book. Goal of a company is not only to improve one measure in isolation. The goal is to reduce the operational expense and reduce inventory while simultaneously increase the throughput.
My dad runs a book trading business and he always likes keeping a lot of inventory in hand. Though he gets really good deals when he buys all the books in large stock. But recently I've noticed that the new editions comes in frequently and at times the books are not that much demanding. Since I assist him, I will be suggesting him to reduce the inventory as this not only increases are cost but on the other hand we need to have a storage place where we can keep the entire inventory. By this tactic we might get rid of the storage or at least buy a smaller storage place which can help us reduce are cost. I will be insisting him to use the JIT inventory management system. Also the book helped me alot in explain a lot of concepts that am studying in finance in real life. For example how depreciation of equipment’s are incorporated in the total expenses.
Work comes first! This is always been a motto of in most working professionals. Even in this book we see how Alex Rogo constantly avoids his family and kids. Also he never had time with to go and see his mother. He was hoping that once the plant is stable he can fully participate in all his family activities. But eventually his wife left him at a point where she could not tolerate at all, though things get stable at the end but this did create a lot of emotional and mental instability in Rogo’s life.
I have also been facing same issues in my life. I missed my sisters engagement recently just because I was busy in school and working , henceforth could not travel. I have realised through some other real life incidents too that there should be a balance in everything or else it gets too late. Now I have specially taken last week of from my semester just be a part of my sister's wedding and not regretting in future when everyone from my family will be away from me. If you have a good team you can tackle any sort of situation. For example if your leader is dynamic he can help you get out of any situation as we can see in this book. We have an example of Jonnah, how a person like Jonnah can increase the efficiency of the company. Also we see how a few key people in the plants who when work to their full efficiency can help increasing the productivity , for example how to use NCX-10 efficiently. Good professionals can also give good advice how to decrease the operational expenses. Also if you have a good team which understands each other’s well you end up working in a much relaxed atmosphere and you can have higher productivity. How Pete and his team at one point weren't able to ship the 100 piece order on time but ended up doing it much more dexterously and readily.
I have a boss in my working place and he is just like Jonnah in the book. He gives advice to everyone and generally it’s about giving me hint and I can figure it out everything. This increases my learning process. Regarding team work, I’ve seen my group in one of my hard class , I had an excellent team we understood each other problems , we had open communication. We did make sure that we met when everyone was available. Hence we were able to perform very well in the group project. Whereas I had another class which was considered to be an "easy class" but the group was a disaster, everyone had issues with each other on the tinniest possible problem. Group mates usually didn’t show up on time or submit their work on time. The result was that we all underperformed in that class. So team work can make the toughest work easy and bad team can make an easy task a nightmare for everyone.
I have always ran away from financial ratio etc. But after reading this book it gave me a bigger idea about what should you specifically look at and how can you compare each part to another. How you should focus on reducing your inventory and plus how to be more efficient by using all employees in a productive way. I work part time as a data supervisor in a food factory. Now i have started to use the non productive time of my employees into other useful work like cleaning their machine filters, performing corn quality check. Goal of a company is not only to improve one measure in isolation but to take everything hand in hand. There should be a constant process improvement. At the end of the day the business is about "making money".