Interview with Stewart Witt, Ongoing
Improvement
A consultant
DW: I understand that your introduction to
The Goal
came before you
became a consultant.
SW: Right. I was VP of operations at the time
for a small manufacturing
company, Ohmart/Vega Company, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Someone gave me
the book with the recommendation to read it. And I read it, and it was very
entertaining and made a lot of sense, and I promptly put it right back on the
shelf.
DW: I’ve heard stories like that before.
SW: Right. I just wasn’t ready yet. This company had hired me specifically to
improve their operations and prepare them for growth and make them more
efficient, all that stuff. I had talked the president into hiring a consulting firm,
saying, “I can do these things but we can get it done that much quicker with
some help,” and he was fine with that. So we hired Grant Thornton, and they
came in. We rearranged everything, streamlined everything. They took a look
at the software we were using and made some other recommendations. We
paid them about $120,000 and in about 6-8 months
we started to see some
results. Everyone was very happy because we took lead times down from,
like, two weeks to one week. It was, wow, that’s pretty good!
The problem
was that the same improvements were happening in sales and marketing. So
here comes 40% more orders in the same time frame, and as it trickled out
into the shop, so trickled away my improvements. The capacity I had freed up
was now being doubled up by all these extra
orders and I was back in the
same boat that I was in before.
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