The goal of any manufacturing plant is to make money. Everything else done inside the plant is a means to achieve the goal. There are three different measurements that can be used to reach the goal; they include throughput, operational expense, and inventory. Throughput is the rate at which the plant generates money through sales. Inventory is defined as the money that the system has invested in purchasing things it intends to sell. Operational expense is known as the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. In order to achieve the goal you must achieve a higher throughput while decreasing your inventory and operational expense at the same time. Throughout the novel, the main character, Alex Rogo, is faced with several constraints as he pursues the goal in order to save his struggling manufacturing plant from being closed down. Three of the constraints he faces are financial, policy, and market. All of which he must overcome in order to reach the goal.
At the beginning of the novel, there becomes evidence of a financial constraint. At first, the management of the plant thought it would be necessary to hire more workers or bring back workers who had been previously let go in order to increase the operations at the plant. They did research and found that it wasn’t necessarily that they needed more workers, but they needed the workers they had to be more efficient. Management then focused on finding the bottlenecks in their operations, because these machines were severely impacting their efficiency. After identifying the bottlenecks, the NCX-10 and heat-treat, they realized that they needed to reduce the capacity that the bottlenecks were carrying throughout the day in order to speed up operations. This is a financial constraint because the easiest way to relieve the bottleneck of some of its duties is to bring in another machine. The plant couldn’t afford to purchase another NCX-10 so they had to look elsewhere for solutions. The...