" What did a family crisis and a hospital have to do with throughput?"

As you know, at MSI we pride ourselves in being “throughput specialists.”  We assist our customers in the never ending battle of increasing the speed and efficiency of converting raw materials to saleable products.  A recent family crisis helped me to recognize that this passion for increasing throughput extends far past the boundaries of Machinery Systems.

What did a family crisis and a hospital have to do with throughput?  Perhaps I’m stretching this whole throughput thing a little too far, but ever since we started focusing on helping our customers increase their throughput, I can’t help but watch everything around me in terms of throughput.

As you may already know, in January of this year our daughter, Stacey, developed a serious medical condition.  An ear infection that developed into Bacterial Meningitis would not be treated by antibiotics found a way into her brain and required emergency ear and brain surgery followed by another ear operation.  Today she is much better and our families are almost back to where we were except for our much deeper spirituality.

To Stacey’s credit she never once asked, “Why me?” or “What did I ever do to deserve this?”  In fact, she inspired our spirituality by reviewing all her blessings every evening.

I have read that U.S. hospitals are the most complex human organizations ever devised because they need so many different specialties to work together to be effective.  We saw all of this first hand… ear doctor, ear surgeon, brain surgeon, neurologist, infectious disease specialist, sociologist, reading and motor skill therapists,  MRI, CT scan and EEG technicians, and numerous hospital and home nurses and many others we never met.  It amazed me to watch them communicate with each other.  There were many face to face conferences, telephone conversations, test results were communicated by a computer and what really surprised me was the high usage of the old fashion fax machine.  There was one other invaluable group of “specialists” I must acknowledge… Stacey and our family.  I believe that as individuals we are still our own best doctor.  We started a notebook at the very beginning of our journey.  We kept track of the numerous discussions with all medical professionals.  We questioned them on every medication and each procedure.  In one case, we actually had the ear surgeon diagram the second ear operation (which was more extensive than the first) in our notebook.  We went prepared to every doctor visit with our list of questions and logged in the answers.

Yes, Stacey was blessed.  What could have been catastrophic has taken the form of a positive spiritual journey.  Since we are a spiritual family, we believe our Lord guided the right decisions to be made in a timely manner, but we also believe our family notebook guided us through our successful “throughput” experience.  The moral of the story… Strive to be “throughput specialists” in every area — inside our customer's plant and in your personal life!

Sincerely,