Book Report
“The Goal: A process of ongoing Improvement”
By Eliyah M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
The Goal, written by Eliyah Goldratt and Jeff Cox, is a 40-chapter book. It is a novel that tells that story of a businessman that is in charge of a plant. This book is more like a business textbook, but is very interesting and easy to understand because is written as a story. As an operation management student, I think this is a very educative book, because it gives you real life situation examples that could happen to anyone. There is a lot to learn from this book. Alex Rogo is a 38-year old plant manager. He is working for the UniCo Company. Six months ago he got promoted and transferred to his hometown, Bearington, where he is the head manager in the Uniware manufacturing plant. Mr. Rogo is a super dedicated employee, always trying to look for the best interest of the manufacturing plant. On the other hand, we have Bill Peach, the VP of the company. He is the direct boss of Alex, which gave him a three months period to show an improvement in the plant, otherwise the plan will be shut down. The story begins with Mr. Peach demanding Alex to take care of the order No. 41427 which was overdue and ship it that same day. This situation was the beginning of the possible shut down of the plant. Even though the order was shipped that day; there were many other wrong things going on in the plant, which lead it to be neither productive nor profitable. So, Mr. Peach gave an ultimatum to Alex. The plant would be shut down within the next 3 months if he did not see any improvement in the production.
At this point, Alex was confronting couple of challenges. First, finding the reason why the plant was not productive even thought they had good machinery. Second, he was dealing with personal problems at home with his wife. Alex was aware of the plant’s low productivity that leads to have delays of deliveries and shipments. He knew the