Reddit reviews The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Maybe because you never told me about it? It sounds just like http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0884271951/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1464910958&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=the+goal

I had to take a supply chain management class for my degree. Along with the text book the teacher also had us read this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397485408&sr=8-1&keywords=the+goal

It's an allegory so it's not technical by any means but gives you an idea on how to think about all this stuff.

It's a really easy read, should only take you a day or two.

this might be a basic place to start.

Other than that, learn where your constraints are and exploit it. They'll keep moving around according to my recent read of The Goal, so keep trying new things to keep your throughput up. Be data driven.

Ignore at least half the advice tossed around in this sub as it might actually be harmful.

Here is a better quality image http://i.imgur.com/o7as8IF.png

These is the book list I was able to read:
In Hand: Broken Windows (Can't find specific book)
Stack:
?
?
How to stay alive in the woods
The Lying Brain
The Psychology of Memory
False Confessions (Not sure specific book)
The U.S Army Survival Manual (Not sure specific book)
?
The Measure of Madness
The Book of Basic Machines: The U.S. Navy Training Manual
?
?
The R Document
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Deception (Not sure of specific book)
?
?
Polyurethane Technology (Not sure of specific book)
?
Polyamide (Something)
Crime and Public Policy (Not sure of specific book)
?
?
Spectacle: An Optimist's Handbook

You have a golden opportunity in front of you. You can either seize the opportunity, work your ass off, and transform both yourself and the company. Or, you can sit on the sidelines.


The more problems a company has, the more opportunities there are. Do you aspire to top out as a rank-and-file employee, doing your prescribed work in your cubicle, working for a company where you are completely expendable, collecting your paycheck and never doing much more in life? Or do you want to be an agent of change, grow to become a leader, and the COO in 7-10 years?


If you don't have ambition, than call OSHA, sit on the sidelines, bide your time, and complain about the problems.


If you have ambition, then devote yourself to your work. Make that company your engineering playground. You are young, this is the perfect time to reinvent yourself.

If you have ambition, here is what I would do:

1. Buy a copy of the The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Order it today so you can read it over the weekend. You will probably want to refer to it, so buy it, don't bother with the Library.
   
   
   
2. Get a spiral notebook and begin mapping out the company. Take a brainstorming session over the next few days. Articulate as best as possible the following:
   
   

• What does the company provide? How do they get customers? What is their competitive advantage?
  
• Org chart to the best of your ability - with quick summaries on perceived job duties
  
• General process flows of the entire company. Start at a high level - Finance, Marketing, R&D, Manufacturing, Distribution, HR, etc - do this to the best of your ability. What are the inputs and outputs? This is just to give a basic idea of how the company operates. Regularly review and revise this as your understanding of the company grows.
  
• Detailed process flow of the manufacturing plant. Group by department and note inputs & outputs. Capacities. Bottlenecks. Production sensitivity.
  
  

3. Now the real work begins. Brainstorm every problem you can think of with the company. Take your lengthy list and then brainstorm all the root causes of those problems. And the root causes of those root causes. And so on.
   
   
   
4. Take your expanded list of problems and jot down possible solutions to each problem. I hate using buzzwords, but make them S.M.A.R.T. . With your list of problems and solutions, apply a loose PFMEA scale to each to get a sense of how severe each problem is, how frequent it is.
   
   
5. Considering your list of problems, your corresponding solutions, and the priority assigned, now you will go back through and assign costs. What is the cost of not correcting the problem? Lost throughput? Insurance claims? Turnover (costing money in training)? What is the cost of solving the problem with your solution? Estimate this all of this to the best of your ability. You will be coming back to this notebook daily in your career and revising as you grow in knowledge and experience.
   
   
6. Now it is time to act. Take the low hanging fruit, the easy problems to fix with simple solutions, and implement them. If they need buy-in from management, get it. Learn how to sell your ideas. Make concise presentations and keep them accessible so you can at any moment be ready to give someone above you a quick improvement strategy.
   
   
   To be clear your management isn't interested in hearing problems. They want to hear solutions. They want to hear solutions with clear action plans, costs, and value.
   
   If you have the ambition and motivation to be the person to drive the change, follow the above outline. It will take a lot of work. You can't just clock out at the end of the day, get high and play video games. You can have some unwind time, but spend at least 2 hours constantly analyzing the company and finding ways to change it for the better.
   
   
   To close, let me be clear on one thing:
   
   >They have me doing a little bit of every job
   
   
   This is a good thing. I hope you realize that. Please don't have the "that's not my job" mentality. If you have that attitude, you have already limited the amount of success you can achieve in life.

Time to immerse yourself in the world of Lean manufacturing and production. Good reading includes The Goal, and Taiichi Ohno on how Toyota learned to really manufacture efficiently, and anything written by Shingeo Shingo. Don't think "manufacturing" reduces quality, in fact if anything modern manufacturing concepts increase quality while reducing waste, and are optimal for small scale production such as roasting.

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: http://smile.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1


|Country|Link|Charity Links|
|:-----------|:------------|:------------|
|USA|smile.amazon.com|EFF|
|UK|www.amazon.co.uk|Macmillan|
|Spain|www.amazon.es||
|France|www.amazon.fr||
|Germany|www.amazon.de||
|Japan|www.amazon.co.jp||
|Canada|www.amazon.ca||
|Italy|www.amazon.it||
|India|www.amazon.in||
|China|www.amazon.cn||




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If you'd like a digestible entry point to systems thinking, I suggest starting with "The Goal". It's a (contrived) story about a person applying systems thinking in the manufacturing sector, circa 1985.

Lately I've just started reading books to help get my mind back into a happy place. If I'm burned out or frustrated, taking a half hour to read through a few more chapters of The Goal or something similar helps get me motivated again.

I really enjoyed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt which is tangentially related to the accounting field (deals more with operational improvements).

I agree with the other poster that self-improvement and leadership-oriented books are also helpful. One recent one is the Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene.

I will recommend the book The Goal

It is a good read too along with Built to Sell

We joke in my company that we have 200 5-person teams... which sort of gets at your point. Each team understands what it does but we have varying degrees of understanding of the whole. (But that's okay, there's a 5-person team whose job is to understand the whole.)

Most corporations borrow heavily from standard corporate culture, and that's how you most easily make such a large mass of people useful; you use what has worked before. I can look up job descriptions of my job at other companies.

If you really want to know more I recommend the book The Goal. It's a business management book, but it's written as a story so it's an easy, enjoyable read.

If that one's too dry for you, you might try [The Goal] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1_ha?ie=UTF8&qid=1375240896&sr=8-1&keywords=the+goal) or Velocity- both focus on Lean and Six Sigma, but take the form of a novel instead of a textbook.

I think that The Goal is a great book on business and management.

THE book to read about changing how you view optimization problems in general is actually a novel called The Goal. I read it about every other year. It's really easy to look at a problem and point at a symptom as the cause, and that's what the book really talks about. Again, it's a novel, not a text book, but it's so good, and a really easy read. It focuses on optimization in manufacturing, but the lessons can be applied to any field.

The math of optimization is actually probability and statistics. The formula you're building for a system includes variables that align with some sort of probability curve, and so the "answer" is what results in the best result over time, not at any given moment. What really describes all of this is called Stochastic Processes. Unfortunately, I don't really have a good book for you to just buy and learn that, but there appear to be quite a few on Amazon that cover the subject.

So, the first will change your brain, the second will get you down the path of nitty gritty. In my opinion, everyone in the world should read The Goal, though.

Some of these are directly related to programming and some are not but are additional reading that touch on skills that most every programmer should have some concept or idea of.

I've read all of these at some point throughout my career and can attest to their usefulness. Here's my personal list:

• Rework
  
  
• Refactoring - Honestly, anything written by Martin Fowler.
  
• The Mythical Man Month
  
  
• The Phoenix Project
  
  
• The Goal - targeted towards manufacturing and production, but the lessons can be applied pretty much anywhere there's a process (anywhere).
  
  
• Programming Language Pragmatics
  
  
• The Traveling Salesman
  
  
• The Art of Computer Programming - This collection of books is a journey spanning many years. The problems presented in the book are ones you'll want to mull over for some time, and the type of problems that would be good to think about during a daily commute.
  
  
  

May I stand on a soapbox?

Automation isn't that simple. Automating processes that are already flawed to begin with is worse than no automation at all - as all automation does of a bad system is just compound the issue, and bring in new constraints.

Basically - automation is a solution, but it isn't the only solution - in fact, automation should be the last solution looked at it - and your solution should be the last step in the process improvement.

If you're serious about getting into management, and you work with processes that you feel could be made better or automated - I'd suggest the following reading:

The Goal

The Toyota Way

There is a wonderful book about process improvement from about 35 years ago called The Goal by Eli Goldwater that is written as a novel. Wonderful book - terrible novel: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement https://www.amazon.com/dp/0884271951/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_AS.vDb6F2QH3T

And The Phoenix Project - on DevOps is an homage to The Goal and is also a novel: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942788290/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_9Y.vDb2981BYS

Also an amazing book and a terrible novel. Both of these are great examples of the power of different learning styles. The novel format accommodates Socratic Learning (questioning) and is just a terrific way to teach what would otherwise be very dry subjects. Humans are wired for storytelling and these books are exemplars of that.

Oldy but a goody...

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - Eliyahu M. Goldratt. A very interesting way of describing manufacturing and other processes to everyday things that most people can relate to. Definitely a must read for anyone who will be going into process engineering or will be an engineer for a manufacturing company.

I don't know what the source you linked to is thinking, but reducing inventory does not decrease risk, it increases it. Just think, I keep 100 widgets of inventory, and use 20 every day. That means that if something happens in the supply chain, and I don't receive any shipments of that product, the production line can continue running for 5 days. On the other hand, if I keep 20 units in inventory, I am relying on a shipment every single day, or else my entire production shuts down. There are several videos on Youtube with Elon talking about the the production line shutting down because of random supply chain issues. Most of those happened a couple of years ago, but it is a concern when you run a very lean operation. That is extremely risky. Reducing inventory does reduce costs, which is probably why they do it.

Also, I wouldn't trust any source that tries to sell you a product at the end.

> TradeGecko makes world class inventory, order, and supply chain management software for SMEs to help them grow their business. In fact, we support multi warehouse and multi currency functions because we know that many SMEs run global businesses. Our software helps businesses manage their inventory in a way that best suits their practices and objectives - whether it’s Tesla’s lean inventory management model or otherwise.

If you haven't read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, I highly recommend it.

For more Tesla specific things to look into, Elon has mentioned bringing in the capability to produce the majority of the components in the car, even if they continue to typically buy the components from outside vendors, it will give them the capacity to get over a supply chain issue.

Oooh....read "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt - Very easy read, I loved it. There will be plenty to criticize too!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/

If you find this process stuff interesting, read The Goal: http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951

1. Read The Goal
   
   
2. Look for Herbie
   
   
3. ???
   
   
4. Profit

Thanks for posting this lecture introducing his at the time new book When Nietzsche Wept (2011).

In the lecture the story he starts with - the tale of the two healers from Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi - who find each other is a great way to start a talk as it kept me listening.

I only have his Existential Psychotherapy and it reads more like a text book. Explaining through prose, or teaching by telling a story, like the book Fish or The Goal is a very entertaining way to learn something and that appears to be what he's doing with When Nietzsche Wept.

Apparently he brings up the tale of the two teachers again later in The Gift of Therapy in 2013.

https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=asc_df_0884271951/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312175933381&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13974902425146111108&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9026278&hvtargid=pla-434522630098&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=60258871817&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312175933381&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13974902425146111108&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9026278&hvtargid=pla-434522630098