The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: Impressive, but why is only one business unit of Dow Corning using
TOC? What bothers me is that this person is talking about a span of
over five years. If it worked so well, why didn’t it spread to the other
business units? Is it the Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome?
EG: Before we dive into speculation about psychology of organizations, let’s
examine the facts. We are talking about a middle manager who works in one
corner of a large company. Why should we be surprised that, in five years,
this person was not yet able to take his whole company through a major
paradigm shift? And, by the way, as you read in his letter, he is making nice
progress; he has already moved into a much more influential position.
DW: Still, even with enough time, is it possible for a middle manager to
influence his whole company?
EG: Yes. But of course, such a person will need a lot of stamina and patience.

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DW: What makes you so sure that it is possible at all?
EG: What evidence will convince you that it is possible?
DW: Give me an example of a middle level manager working for a large
company who has succeeded in institutionalizing the usage of the know-
how written in 
The Goal
. I mean institutionalizing it across the board.
EG: Given that General Motors is the largest manufacturing company in the
world, you should get an outstanding proof by interviewing 
Kevin Kohls. 
(Eli Goldratt interview to be continued.)
Interview with Kevin Kohls
 General Motors
Director of Throughput Analysis and Simulation for North American
Assembly Plants.
DW: What drove you to seek help from 
The Goal
?
KK: It goes back almost 15 years, when I was starting off as a controls
engineer at the Cadillac Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant, just returning
from Purdue University after completing a masters degree in electrical
engineering. When I left a year and half earlier, the plant was just starting
production. When I returned, they had yet to hit their production targets; in
fact they were far short. As you might imagine, everyone was frustrated
about not hitting these targets, and there was a lot of effort being expended to
improve the system, with minimal results.
I was frustrated as well. The solutions I was putting in place rarely had a
significant impact on the production of the plant, and it wasn’t clear why.
About that same time, Dave VanderVeen from GM Research made a
presentation to Larry Tibbetts, who was then plant manager. Dave was
promoting a research tool that he said would help improve throughput in the
plant. Larry was very impressed, and asked me to go see Dave to find out if
we could use this tool at Hamtramck. When I went down to the Research
Building at the GM Tech Center in Warren, Dave explained what a
bottleneck was and how his tool identified it. He handed me a copy of 
The

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Goal
and said if you want to understand bottlenecks and how to improve
throughput, this is the book to read.
I took the book home and started to read it right away. The first thing that
surprised me was that it was written in novel format. The second was how
much I could identify with what was happening in Alex’s plant. I finally had
to put it down at 2 A.M. so I could get some sleep, but I finished it the next
day. I wanted to apply the concepts immediately, so I began collecting data
from the systems we had, and putting it into the bottleneck program. After
about a week of effort, I was fairly certain I had found the bottleneck. The
scary part is that it was not 20 feet away, on the production line right outside
my office!