I stop and glance away for a second, and see Jonah sitting there smoking his cigar.
"So that what?" asks my mother.
"Uh... so that we can increase productivity," I mumble, waving my hand in the air.
And Jonah says, have they really increased productivity at \ our plant? Sure they have, I say. We had-what?-a thirty-six percent improvement in one area. Jonah puffs his cigar.
"Is something the matter?" my mother asks.
"I just remembered something, that's all."
"What? Something bad?" she asks.
"No, an earlier conversation I had with the man I talked to last night," I say.
My mother puts her hand on my shoulder. "Alex, what's wrong?" she's asking. "Come on, you can tell me. I know something's wrong. You show up out of the blue on my doorstep, you're calling people all over the place in the mid- dle of the night. What is it?"
"See, Mom, the plant isn't doing so well... and, ah... well, we're not making any money." My mother's brow darkens.
"Your big plant not making any money?" she asks. "But you're telling me about this fancy guy Granby coming, and these robot things, whatever they are. And you're not making any money?"
"That's what I said, Mom." "Don't these robot things work?" "Mom-"
"If they don't work, maybe the store will take them back."
"Mom, will you forget about the robots!"
She shrugs. "I was just trying to help."
I reach over and pat her hand.
"Yes, I know you were," I say. "Thanks. Really, thanks for
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everything. Okay? I've got to get going now. I've really got a lot of work to do."
I stand up and go to get my briefcase. My mother follows. Did I get enough to eat? Would I like a snack to take with me for later in the day? Finally, she takes my sleeve and holds me in one place.
"Listen to me, Al. Maybe you've got some problems. I know you do, but this running all over the place, staying up all night isn't good for you. You've got to stop worrying. It's not going to help you. Look what worrying did to your father," she says. "It killed him."
"But, Mom, he was run over by a bus."
"So if he hadn't been so busy worrying he would have looked before he crossed the street."
I sigh. "Yeah, well, Mom, you may have a point. But it's more complicated than you think."
"I mean it! No worrying!" she says. "And this Granby fellow, if he's making trouble for you, you let me know. I'll call him and tell him what a worker you are. And who should know better than a mother? You leave him to me. I'll straighten him out."
I smile. I put my arm around her shoulders.
"I bet you would, Mom."
"You know I would."
I tell Mom to call me as soon as her phone bill arrives in the mail, and I'll come over and pay it. I give her a hug and a kiss good-bye, and I'm out of there. I walk out into the daylight and get into the Mazda. For a moment, I consider going straight to the office. But a glance at the wrinkles in my suit and a rub of the stubble on my chin convinces me to go home and clean up first.
Once I'm on my way, I keep hearing Jonah's voice saying to me: "So your company is making thirty-six percent more money from your plant just by installing some robots? Incredible." And I remember that I was the one who was smiling. I was the one who thought he didn't understand the realities of manufacturing. Now I feel like an idiot.
Yes, the goal is to make money. I know that now. And, yes, Jonah, you're right; productivity did not go up thirty-six percent just because we installed some robots. For that matter, did it go up at all? Are we making any more money because of the robots? And the truth is, I don't know. I find myself shaking my head.
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But I wonder how Jonah knew? He seemed to know right away that productivity hadn't increased. There were those ques- tions he asked.
One of them, I remember as I'm driving, was whether we had been able to sell any more products as a result of having the robots. Another one was whether we had reduced the number of people on the payroll. Then he had wanted to know if inventories had gone down. Three basic questions.
When I get home, Julie's car is gone. She's out some place, which is just as well. She's probably furious at me. And I simply do not have time to explain right now.
After I'm inside, I open my briefcase to make a note of those questions, and I see the list of measurements Jonah gave me last night. From the second I glance at those definitions again, it's obvious. The questions match the measurements.
That's how Jonah knew. He was using the measurements in the crude form of simple questions to see if his hunch about the robots was correct: did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the last, exactly what he said: did our inventories go down?
With that observation, it doesn't take me long to see how to express the goal through Jonah's measurements. I'm still a little puzzled by the way he worded the definitions. But aside from that, it's clear that every company would want to have its throughput go up. Every company would also want the other two, inventory and operational expense, to go down, if at all pos- sible. And certainly it's best if they all occur simultaneously-just as with the trio that Lou and I found.
So the way to express the goal is this?
Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both in- ventory and operating expense.
That means if the robots have made throughput go up and the other two go down, they've made money for the system. But what's really happened since they started working?
I don't know what effect, if any, they've had on throughput. But off the top of my head, I know inventories have generally increased over the past six or seven months, although I can't say for sure if the robots are to blame. The robots have increased our depreciation, because they're new equipment, but they haven't directly taken away any jobs from the plant; we simply shifted
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people around. Which means the robots had to increase opera- tional expense.
Okay, but efficiencies have gone up because of the robots. So maybe that's been our salvation. When efficiencies go up, the cost-per-part has to come down.
But did the cost really come down? How could the cost-per- part go down if operational expense went up?
By the time I make it to the plant, it's one o'clock, and I still haven't thought of a satisfactory answer. I'm still thinking about it as I walk through the office doors. The first thing I do is stop by Lou's office.
"Have you got a couple minutes?" I ask.
"Are you kidding?" he says. "I've been looking for you all morning."
He reaches for a pile of paper on the corner of his desk. I know it's got to be the report he has to send up to division.
"No, I don't want to talk about that right now," I tell him. "I've got something more important on my mind."
I watch his eyebrows go up.
"More important than this report for Peach?"
"Infinitely more important than that," I tell him.
Lou shakes his head as he leans back in his swivel chair and gestures for me to have a seat.
"What can I do for you?"
"After those robots out on the floor came on line, and we got most of the bugs out and all that," I say, "what happened to our sales?"
Lou's eyebrows come back down again; he's leaning forward and squinting at me over his bifocals.
"What kind of question is that?" he asks.
"A smart one, I hope," I say. "I need to know if the robots had any impact on our sales. And specifically if there was any increase after they came on line."
"Increase? Just about all of our sales have been level or in a downhill slide since last year."
I'm a little irritated.