Production

What the business schools don't teach you to survive and flourish. Putting management theory into practice faces some major challenges. Some of the raw realities of modern work environments require a high level of intuition and judgement over and above scientific methodology alone. This book sets out the hard learnt experience of a senior Scotland Yard officer and centres on three themes: How to develop and look after yourself as an individual manager; how to make operations happen and work successfully; how to develop a high performance team around you. This book has many important messages for new managers, enabling them to survive and eventually flourish whilst guiding more experienced Directors to secure the holy grail of truly exceptional performance. It has equal relevance to those in the public, private and voluntary sector who have to translate strategy into action

More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the Balanced Scorecard into action.

Now, using their ongoing research with hundreds of Balanced Scorecard adopters across the globe, the authors have created a powerful new tool--the "strategy map"--that enables companies to describe the links between intangible assets and value creation with a clarity and precision never before possible. Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy--implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation--depends on managing four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. The authors show how companies can use strategy maps to link those processes to desired outcomes; evaluate, measure, and improve the processes most critical to success; and target investments in human, informational, and organizational capital. Providing a visual "aha!" for executives everywhere who can't figure out why their strategy isn't working, Strategy Maps is a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.

Selecting the Right Manufacturing Improvement Tools offers an easy-to-read and comprehensive review of the most important current industrial improvement tools that every manufacturing or industrial executive, operational manager or engineer needs to know, including which tool to use for a particular type of manufacturing situation.

But his book goes beyond a simple comparison of improvement tools to show how these tools can be implemented and supported. Instead, it offers a broader strategic explanation of how they relate to one another, and their relative strengths and weaknesses in the larger context of the entire enterprise. It demonstrates how to use these tools in an integrated way such that they are not just be viewed as another “program of the month” or management fad. Selecting the Right Manufacturing Improvement Tools guides the use of these individual management tools within the need for aligning the organization, developing leadership, and managing change, all for creating an environment where these tools will be more successfully applied.

· Provides an excellent review of the most popular improvement tools and strategies - Lean Manufacturing, Kaizen, including 5S, Kanban, Quick Changeover, and Standardization, Total Productive Maintenance, Six Sigma, Supply Chain Management, Reliability Centered Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance (or Condition Monitoring), and Root Cause Analysis.
· Illustrates the use of each tool with case studies, using a fictitious company called "Beta International," which continues its journey to business excellence from author's previous book, Making Common Sense Common Practice
· Describes the foundational elements necessary for any tool to work - leadership, organizational alignment and discipline, teamwork, performance measurement, change management, and the role of innovation.
· Concludes with a recommended hierarchy for the use of the various tools, and provides enough information so that individual circumstances and issues can be related to these improvement tools, making better decisions and having greater business success.

Bring the miracle of Lean Six Sigma improvement out of manufacturing and into services

Much of the U.S. economy is now based on services rather than manufacturing. Yet the majority of books on Six Sigma and Lean--today's major quality improvement initiatives--explain only how to implement these techniques in a manufacturing environment.

Lean Six Sigma for Services fills the need for a service-based approach, explaining how companies of all types can cost-effectively translate manufacturing-oriented Lean Six Sigma tools into the service delivery process.

Filled with case studies detailing dramatic service improvements in organizations from Lockheed Martin to Stanford University Hospital, this bottom-line book provides executives and managers with the knowledge they need to:

Reduce service costs by 30 to 60 percent
Improve service delivery time by 50 percent
Expand capacity by 20 percent without adding staff

Written by the industrial engineer who developed SMED (single-minute exchange of die) for Toyota, A Revolution in Manufacturing provides a full overview of this powerful just in time production tool. It offers the most complete and detailed instructions available anywhere for transforming a manufacturing environment in ways that will speed up production and make small lot inventories feasible. The author delves into both the theory and practice of the SMED system, explaining fundamentals as well as techniques for applying SMED. The critically acclaimed text is supported with hundreds of illustrations and photographs, as well as twelve chapter-length case studies.

In this classic text, Taiichi Ohno--inventor of the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing--shares the genius that sets him apart as one of the most disciplined and creative thinkers of our time. Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota's attempts at Lean production, Ohno's book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor. A historical and philosophical description of just-in-time and Lean manufacturing, this work is a must read for all students of human progress. On a more practical level, it continues to provide inspiration and instruction for those seeking to improve efficiency through the elimination of waste.