Local Robotics Optimization Makes the Plant Slower - Lessons from Goldratt's The Goal

Rene Grywnow’s 5-Minute Business Punch · Sep 20, 2026 · 5m

This week counted the robot fleet’s energy and opened a single humanoid. Part III turns to a leadership question older than Physical AI — can a busy robot make the whole plant slower? — through Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox’s The Goal(North River Press, 1984).

The purpose of a plant is to make money by increasing throughput while controlling inventory and operating expense; the method is the Theory of Constraints, find the bottleneck, subordinate everything to it, then elevate it. Robotics programs often do the opposite: they maximize robot uptime and cell efficiency and accidentally starve…