Eliyahu Goldratt

"My compliments,’’ he says. "When you are productive you are accomplishing something in terms of your goal, right?’’

And he’s saying, "Alex, I have come to the conclusion that productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive. Do you follow me?’’

What I’m telling you is, productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is,’’ he says.

To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow

If I can find some logical relationship between our daily operations and the overall performance of the company then I’ll have a basis for knowing if something is productive or non-productive . . . moving toward the goal or away from it.

You see, there is more than one way to express the goal. Do you understand? The goal stays the same, but we can state it in different ways, ways which mean the same thing as those two words, ‘making money.’’’

Their names are throughput, inventory and operational expense.’’

Throughput,’’ he says, "is the rate at which the system generates money through sales.’’

And they should be; a measurement not clearly defined is worse than useless

Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to