What you’re saying is that making an employee work and profiting from that work are two different things. - Eliyahu M. Goldratt

What can I possibly do to be more competitive? I’ve done cost reduction. No other manager in this division has cut costs to the degree I have. There is nothing left to trim. And, despite what Peach says, my efficiencies are pretty damn good. He’s got other plants with worse, I know that. But the better ones don’t have the competition I do. Maybe I could push efficiencies some more, but . . . I don’t know. It’s like whipping a horse that’s already running as fast as it can.

What we know now,” I tell him, “is that we shouldn’t be looking at each local area and trying to trim it. We should be trying to optimize the whole system. Some resources have to have more capacity than others. The ones at the end of the line should have more than the ones at the beginning — sometimes a lot more. Am I right?

[Operating expense is defined as] all the money the system spends in turning inventory into throughput.