The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is an educational business book written in a new format to help illustrate the issues facing the supply chain and the world of manufacturing. The Lens was written in 1984 and is based on an industrial engineering practice known as the theory of constraints. The main character is Alex Rogo, manager of the UniCo factory at the Bearington site. The novel takes the reader on Alex's journey to improve factory performance and understand the steps to process improvement. From the beginning, the reader is informed of the problems Alex faces in his factory. It is obvious that the Bearington factory operates on a shipment basis, there is no stable process that appears to ship orders on time, but this is based on which order has the more visibility. Alex has a background in industrial engineering and has done his best to keep the factory moving at appropriate throughput and maintain efficiency, but it doesn't seem to be enough. Bill Peach, division manager of UniCo, gives Alex an ultimatum to improve the performance of the Bearington plant or it will be closed. This difficult situation forces Alex to think of his former physics teacher whom he recently met at the airport, Jonah. Jonah and Alex got into a discussion about the factory and Jonah wondered how successful Alex's factory had actually been. So now that Alex was faced with the factory closing, he began to think that Jonah knew something that could save the factory. Once Alex tracked Jonah down, they began discussing the problems the factory was facing. Jonah teaches Alex the Socratic method by asking him questions to force Alex to develop the solutions himself. The first question was “What is the