The Goal, as defined by the characters/the author, is to make money. This is the goal of businesses in capitalism - obviously a more nuanced goal might help the species long-term, which might include elements like “make money in such a way that the planet can support life” or “make and distribute money in a way that doesn’t lead to violent revolution,” or something like that. However, for my purposes at my job, “make money” is a good working goal.
There are three ways to make money:
- Increase throughput, which is the the rate at which the system generates money through sales.
- Reduce inventory, which is all the money that system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.
- Reduce operational expense, which is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput.
Anything activity that accomplishes one of these three objectives gets us closer to the goal. Any activity which does not accomplish one of these these three objectives takes us further away from the goal.
In a manufacturing plant, there are two types of resources:
- Bottleneck: Any resource whose capacity is less than the demand placed upon it
- Non-bottleneck: Any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it
The plant should be balanced not so that the capacity of any resource equals market demand, but rather so that the throughput is equal to market demand.
Non-bottleneck resources should not be activated at full capacity - doing so will build up inventory, which represents money sitting around doing nothing. Rather, they should be activated to the maximum capacity of the whole plant, which again is determined by the bottleneck resources.