Critical reading for manufacturing! FREE COPY of The Goal

  • More than 6 million copies sold
  • Continuously in print since 1984
  • Translated into 21 languages
  • Taught in over 200 colleges and universities

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Get this book and discover...

  • Why your efficiency improvements are causing those late deliveries
  • The one simple change you can make to your shop floor to increase capacity by 20% (and deliver on-time)!

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Everyone in your plant is working to their limit, but you’re just not making money!

Every day, you strive to maximise productivity. Efficiency numbers are up but On Time In Full (OTIF) is down.

You do your best to control costs by balancing capacities but you have to fight fires to get jobs out on time—and firefighting costs money.

You create detailed plans to ensure jobs complete on-time—then customers make last-minute changes or demand urgent jobs.

The fact is, the market is chaotic. But your shop floor should not be!

Your free copy of The Goal will show you how to quiet the noise.

Traditional practices work perfectly, in theory...

The Goal exposes the uncomfortable truth: traditional efficiency-improvement practices cause the operational problems they are designed to solve.

The constant fire-fighting. The regular replanning of the schedule. Inflated WIP and frequent rework. Poor performance. And, sub-optimal profitability.

More importantly, The Goal describes a solution—a five step process that proceeds from a profound observation of the nature of reality—a process that any smart production manager can implement within weeks (not months)!

This solution enables you to rapidly increase throughput, turn inventory into cash, and kick the expediting habit for good!

Why a capacity-balanced plant isn't!

Every shop floor is made up of operations with finite capacities, dependencies and variability.

No one will argue with that, right! However, traditional improvement practises embrace finite capacities but ignore dependencies and variability.

More importantly, they ignore the toxic combination of dependences AND variability within a capacity-balanced plant where delays compound delays until you’re overwhelmed by a massive backlog of unfinished, overdue orders.

Falling in love with bottlenecks

The Goal adopts the opposite approach. Instead of a theorist’s oversimplification, it embraces the true nature of reality as its starting point, arguing that a balanced plant must deteriorate rapidly into chaos.

More, the only hope for salvation is to deliberately unbalance it!

The Goal shows that that the key to doing this—without throwing caution to the wind—is to maintain a small number of strategically-located queues of WIP within your plant.

You can easily determine the placement, size and make-up of these queues using the ultimate source of management intelligence: your bottleneck (or constraint).

With strategic WIP queues, it becomes possible to manage the production and release of work so the constraint always has work.

And with the knowledge that shop output can only ever be the same as the output of your constraint, it’s finally possible to meaningfully schedule the volume and sequence of jobs so more work gets out the door on time!

Learn crucial production management insights

How the single-minded pursuit of efficiency coupled with an obsession with super-granular planning cause late delivery and a dramatic contraction in plant capacity.

Why improving throughput must be the number one production objective, not reducing cost or improving efficiency.

Why bottlenecks are necessary and must be managed, not eliminated.

How to use The Five Focusing Steps and the Drum-buffer-rope system to discover and manage your system bottlenecks.

Why preventing overproduction is crucial to success.

Why Cost Accounting practises are a disease that destroys throughput, ruins on-time delivery and undercuts profitability.

How you can fix your plant problems without expensive scheduling software but a simple whiteboard marker, and a piece of paper.

Why most manufacturing improvement initiatives fail

The Goal also reveals that most manufacturing improvement initiatives fail because they break one (or all!) of the three principle rules of optimisation, planning and coordination.

These rules state that:

  1. Local optimisation does not lead to global increases in throughput. (It causes overproduction and inventory build-up!)
  2. Balancing capacity with demand is impossible. (Natural variability and process dependencies will create too much production, or too little!)
  3. Detailed schedules cannot be followed. (It leads to people working on wrong priorities!)

Any management system that breaks these rules will itself break down with drastic consequences for throughput, on-time performance and profitability.

One of the most influential business
management books ever

“The most read management book ever”
The Economist.
“The 9th best-selling business book of all time”
Amazon.com.
"A survey of the reading habits of managers found that though they buy books by the likes of Tom Peters for display purposes, the one management book they have actually read from cover to cover is The Goal."
The Economist.
"This theory provided a persuasive solution for factories struggling with production delays and low revenues."
Harvard Business Review.
"Like Mrs. Fields and her cookies, The Goal was too tasty to remain obscure. Companies began buying big batches and management schools included it in their curriculums."
Fortune Magazine.
"Anybody who considers himself a manager should rush out, buy and devour this book immediately. If you are the only one in your place to have read it, your progress along the path to the top may suddenly accelerate...one of the most outstanding business books I have ever encountered."
Punch Magazine.
“One of the 25 most-influential business management books ever written.”
Time Inc.

Who should read
The Goal

The Goal vividly illustrates the real steps that managers in make-to-order and engineer-to-order environments must take to hit shipping dates perfectly every time.

Millions will attest that it’s compulsive reading.

But it also contains a serious message for business owners, managers, and shop floor workers about how a simple change of approach can achieve high, sustainable on-time delivery rates.

If you’re constantly crashing the schedule to resolve overdue orders (and the accompanying furious customer complaints), or have more unfinished inventory than you know what to do with, this book contains the diagnosis that could turn things around in just weeks.