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Introduction
At the beginning of
my junior year I started reading "The Goal" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. This book is about a manager of a plant
named Alex. Alex's plant has performed poorly on meeting the company’s
criteria of shipments. The plant has been shipping extremely late and even missing orders. The performance of
the plant was noticed at the highest level of management. Bill
Peach, Alex's boss, gave Alex three months to turn around his plant
and make it efficient. Alex at first can’t seem to figure out what is wrong with
his plant. He thinks back to a day when he ran into his old Physics teacher at
an airport. He ended up calling his former teacher and asking him for help. They discussed some things about manufacturing. His physics
teacher Jonah gave him three terms to focus on. The first term, throughput: the amount of material passing through a system
of processes. Second, inventory: all the money that the system has invested in
purchasing things which it intends to sell. Third, operational expense: all the
money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. Throughout
the book Alex refers to these terms to help save is plant from being closed. He
focuses on bottlenecks in his plant, he learns that bottlenecks are what limit
the overall throughput of the plant. Because of this he learns on how to reduce
stress on bottlenecks and even make them more efficient by changing the ways
some processes are done. By the end of the three months he was the most profitable
plant in his sector and was promoted to the position that Bill peach previously
held. Lean manufacturing is reducing waste produced to the minimum possible, there are eight different kinds of waste. Alex successfully does so and even continues to eliminate waste to make his plant and other plants for efficient.
Throughout the class we discussed lean manufacturing and took notes on the book. Weekly assignments allowed us to focus on the main parts of the book that are important to lean manufacturing. Vocabulary sheets and questionnaires and even quizzes were used to ensure we were learning the proper material. The class and myself performed simulations to show how bottlenecks work and variations to not meeting the maximum throughput of each process.
The final assignment "the goal is lean" consisted of three parts. The first part, it was learning the eight different wastes. I had to go through the book and find examples of the wastes and write the page number and a note/description of the section of the book that performed some sort of waste. Second part, we had to write down four of the wastes that we found most important and explain how that part of the book is related to that waste. The final component is to choose one of the types of wastes and a character and describe that charter in the book. I had to state the current situation, then to state how that character eliminated that waste. Doing this whole project including reading the book "The Goal" helped me understand the reasoning for lean and how manufacturing in general follows the same basic principles.
Throughout the class we discussed lean manufacturing and took notes on the book. Weekly assignments allowed us to focus on the main parts of the book that are important to lean manufacturing. Vocabulary sheets and questionnaires and even quizzes were used to ensure we were learning the proper material. The class and myself performed simulations to show how bottlenecks work and variations to not meeting the maximum throughput of each process.
The final assignment "the goal is lean" consisted of three parts. The first part, it was learning the eight different wastes. I had to go through the book and find examples of the wastes and write the page number and a note/description of the section of the book that performed some sort of waste. Second part, we had to write down four of the wastes that we found most important and explain how that part of the book is related to that waste. The final component is to choose one of the types of wastes and a character and describe that charter in the book. I had to state the current situation, then to state how that character eliminated that waste. Doing this whole project including reading the book "The Goal" helped me understand the reasoning for lean and how manufacturing in general follows the same basic principles.
Skills
- Revise drafts to more fully and/or precisely convey meaning—drawing on response from others, self-reflection, and reading one’s own work with the eye of a reader; then refine the text— deleting and/or reorganizing ideas, and addressing potential readers’ questions.
- Reorganize sentence elements as needed and choose grammatical and stylistic options that provide sentence variety, fluency, and flow.
- Use a variety of pre-reading and previewing strategies (e.g., acknowledge own prior knowledge, make connections, generate questions, make predictions, scan a text for a particular purpose or audience, analyze text structure and features) to make conscious choices about how to approach the reading based on purpose, genre, level of difficulty, text demands and features.
- Critically read and interpret instructions for a variety of tasks (e.g., completing assignments, using software, writing college and job applications).
- Analyze characteristics of specific works and authors (e.g., voice, mood, time sequence, author vs. narrator, stated vs. implied author, intended audience and purpose, irony, parody, satire, propaganda, use of archetypes and symbols) and identify basic beliefs, perspectives, and philosophical assumptions underlying an author’s work.
Justification
I chose this to put into my Portfolio because It has to do with a lot of what we do at MTA. Starting with the Goal and lean manufacturing. As we read the book we toured different companies and leaned about CNC machines.