FZ Book Club: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Leader: Johnathan Bratcher, Director of Sales and Operations Nashville
Book: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

Most organizations share a common goal: to be successful and profitable. For us at FZ, this extends to using our success and profitability to have a positive impact on the lives of people. No matter your organization's goal, in order to be successful you must focus your efforts on creating and refining processes that will help get you there. The best way to fine-tune those processes is by identifying the weakest link, as you can only produce as much as your weakest link produces. By concentrating your energy on improving those weak spots and continuously monitoring for new ones, you can ensure steady progress. Simply put, the process towards success is: find the weak link, improve it, find the new weak link, improve it, and keep going!

While this book was written in 1984 and is focused on a manufacturing setting, it is still applicable to FZ and the electrical industry. At FZ, one of our main beliefs is that "The Process is the Goal," meaning we are constantly focused on improving our FZ Way processes and how we execute them. We are continually looking at how we pick the right work, estimate the work correctly, plan the work effectively, and execute the work successfully. Throughout every phase of our FZ Way Processes, we're on the lookout for weak links and how we can fix them.

One example in the book talked of a manufacturing plant focused on creating processes and gathering productivity metrics that did not correlate directly with creating more finished products. They spent time and resources focused on something that had no real impact on the bottom line. When they shifted their focus to gathering metrics that led to their finished products they saw an increase in results. This resonated with me. We can so easily be bogged down with running around and doing things that are outside of our main goal. We should be focusing all of our attention on processes that result in installing work correctly and safely the first time.