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

All organizations have one goal. For most, it all comes down to being profitable. In order to reach that main goal, you must focus all of your efforts on creating and fulfilling the processes that can get you to there. While evaluating those processes, you must determine where the weakest link lies, as you can only produce as much as your weakest link produces. You must focus your energy on improving that weakest link and constantly monitoring in case other weak links appear. Simply put, the process is 'identify the weak link, improve the weak link, identify the new weak link, improve the new weak link, and so on.'

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.