The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Essay

In a situation like Alex Rogo’s, the Plant Manager for the Bearington Division of UniCo Corporation, who has been given three months by his boss to either show a profit or face shutdown, one can be tempted to consider an easy option – quit now and look for another job while your reputation is still intact. The temptations for Alex to consider this option are many – his plant has not shown any profit for quite some time, orders are often shipped months late, the inventory position is so bad that the aisles of the plant floor are crammed with in-process parts, almost all jobs are designated as â€Å"rush† and upon all this his marriage is on the precipe because he has been spending all his time in the plant. However, Alex decides to take the problems head on. In this quest, he is helped by his old Physics professor, Jonah. Rather than giving him ready made answers like a consultant, Jonah forces Alex to think by confronting him with pointed questions designed to help him bring out his intuitive skills. When Alex tells Jonah how he was able to increase productivity by thirty-six percent in one department alone with the use of robots, Jonah points it out to Alex how the robots could not possibly have contributed to the company’s goal – and that in fact in terms of its overall goal, Alex must actually be running a very unproductive plant. Prodded on by Jonah, Alex comes to the conclusion that as a first step, he first and foremost has to ensure that his plant makes money. With a continuous barrage of questions from his teacher, Alex and his team learn how to define measurements so that they better reflect the money making goal of a manufacturing organization. Proceeding systematically, they discover the facts which point to how the bottleneck machine in their plant, or in any plant for that matter, determines the throughput and that the capacity of the entire plant is actually equal to the capacity of the bottleneck. They then devise a system whereby the bottleneck (a machine called NCX-10, in this case ) is kept busy for the maximum amount of time possible – this they do by first ensuring that the NCX-10 is kept running even during lunch breaks and later on by ensuring an adequate buffer in front of the bottleneck so that it would not be idle for want of parts. In the meantime they also save time on another suspected bottleneck, the heat treatment, by relocating ... ...e omni-presence of two phenomena, dependency and variability, in manufacturing environments, it is vital that the system’s actual constraint be identified – which may or may not be physical. All other policies have to be built so that they work within the constraint. That is to say that the non-constrained resources have to be used to maximize the performance of the constrained resource. The next step is to try and improve the constraint itself, if possible. Alex Rogo is successful in turning around his plant because he unwittingly, or by design, follows this same ordered thinking process wherein he goes from first defining his fundamental measures and then exploring the effects of different parts of his plant on these measures. He is then able to identify his constraints and effect changes that allow him to maximize his plants performance within the constraint. Later when he finds that his constraint is no longer physical but has become something intangible beyond his plant, he identifies it correctly as a market constraint and tries to improve it by encouraging his sales staff to come up with new orders. And if all this wasn’t enough, Alex has also managed to save his marriage!

Never Let Me Go Essay

Over the past century, biological engineering has made a huge step forward. They made possible to duplicate human DNA in order to produce a genetic replicate. The novel â€Å"Never Let Me Go† by Kazuo Ishiguro in the fiction story of three friends, as the products of genetic cloning, illustrates the negative view of the human nature. This novel, through the eyes of Kathy H. , shows what it means to be a clone and what problems they experienced growing up. Clones are real humans and should be treated as naturally born humans. The clones were not naturally produced, but they created inside of a government lab. These story shows that they were not considered as a humane, and were treated not as rest of the real people. They were created to increase the health of the greater population. If clones are the real people then it is wrong to donate their vital organs against their will. These clone students who lived in school called Hailsham were cut off from the world. They were told only what they needed to know. Once, their teachers, Miss Lucy, explained to her students that one day they all will donate their organs and then die before they even became middle aged. As naturally born humans, clones should have free will. Further, when they were fifteen years old teenagers they had dreams about future. Some of them wanted to go to America, another wanted to be actors and to be a film stars or to work in supermarkets (81). But Miss Lucy told them â€Å"Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided (81). † Real humans are brought into this world for a purpose and they have free will, not like these clones and it is not right. As a real human, clones should have a chance to choose as we all do. Later, when they were thirteen years old they were told that they will not going to be able to have babies. â€Å"Then there was the whole business about our not being able to have babies (83). † Conclution : The whole idea of cloning humans is wrong

History of Communication Essay

The history of communication dates back to prehistory, with significant changes in communication technologies (media and appropriate inscription tools) evolving in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech approximately 100,000 years ago. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago, and writing in the past few centuries. Petro glyphs The next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, which are dated to around 10,000BC. It is possible that the humans of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes – specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like ropes, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing ‘hunter-gatherer’ cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania. Pictograms A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered in chronological order. Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce, and become increasingly popular around 6000-5000 BC. They were the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC. Ideograms Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent an idea. Their ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form: therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like ‘heat’, ‘light’, ‘day’ or ‘Great God of the Sun’. Ideograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts, so that for example an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only ‘legs’ but also a verb ‘to walk’. Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. For example an eye with a tear means ‘sadness’ in Native Americanideograms in California, as it does for the Aztecs, the early Chinese and the Egyptians. Ideograms were precursors of logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. Examples of ideographical proto-writing systems, thought not to contain language-specific information, include the Vinca script (see also TÄÆ'rtÄÆ'ria tablets) and the early Indus script. In both cases there are claims of decipherment of linguistic content, without wide acceptance.