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Factory Physics
Comprehensive Introduction to Manufacturing Management text covering the behavior laws at work in factories. Examines operating policies and strategic objectives. Hopp presents the concepts of manufacturing processes and controls within a "physics" or "laws of nature" analogy--a novel approach. There is enough quantitative material for an engineer's course, as well as narrative that a management major can understand and apply.
Hardcover
First published August 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 25, 2022
Discovered via Balaji Srinivasan, either on Twitter or a podcast.
This textbook is split into three parts:
Part I: The Lessons of History
Part II: Factory Physics
Part III: Principles in Practice
Part I is a must-read for anyone who works in manufacturing or industry. It's a narrative history of manufacturing in (North) America. The biggest benefit I took away is understanding the history behind some terms that just seem to exist in the present, undefined and unquestioned. For example, MRP (Material Requirements Planning), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), SCM (Supply Chain Management), JIT (Just-in-Time), TQM (Total Quality Management), ISO 9000, Lean, Six Sigma, MES (Manufacturing Execution System), etc. When introduced to these terms as a junior employee they just seem like fixtures, parts of the business. But really they are all different operating philosophies that have been trendy at different points in the last 100 years.
One fascinating (subjective of course... you need to be immersed in this stuff) insight from this section is how the major software companies like SAP and Oracle jumped on each of these trends, and adapted their business software offerings to these trends in plant and business management. As a result, plants and businesses operated differently because they were constrained by the software supporting their operations. If you work in manufacturing you'll be interested in Part I.
Parts II and III fell flat for me. This is mostly a problem with me, the reader: faulty expectations, or reading comprehension, or both. Despite Figure 0.3 on Page 9, I did not find Factory Physics broadly applicable to continuous flow processes (the example given was sugar refining, other examples I'd give: potash mineral processing, or really most chemical refineries creating bulk commodities). Factory Physics is great for widgets like phones and automobiles but less so for bulk commodities like minerals and gas.
As a result I did a bunch of skimming in Parts II and III. Still, lots of great content that's good to know it exists. This will be a great reference textbook.
3 stars - based on the book's impact on me.
This textbook is split into three parts:
Part I: The Lessons of History
Part II: Factory Physics
Part III: Principles in Practice
Part I is a must-read for anyone who works in manufacturing or industry. It's a narrative history of manufacturing in (North) America. The biggest benefit I took away is understanding the history behind some terms that just seem to exist in the present, undefined and unquestioned. For example, MRP (Material Requirements Planning), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), SCM (Supply Chain Management), JIT (Just-in-Time), TQM (Total Quality Management), ISO 9000, Lean, Six Sigma, MES (Manufacturing Execution System), etc. When introduced to these terms as a junior employee they just seem like fixtures, parts of the business. But really they are all different operating philosophies that have been trendy at different points in the last 100 years.
One fascinating (subjective of course... you need to be immersed in this stuff) insight from this section is how the major software companies like SAP and Oracle jumped on each of these trends, and adapted their business software offerings to these trends in plant and business management. As a result, plants and businesses operated differently because they were constrained by the software supporting their operations. If you work in manufacturing you'll be interested in Part I.
Parts II and III fell flat for me. This is mostly a problem with me, the reader: faulty expectations, or reading comprehension, or both. Despite Figure 0.3 on Page 9, I did not find Factory Physics broadly applicable to continuous flow processes (the example given was sugar refining, other examples I'd give: potash mineral processing, or really most chemical refineries creating bulk commodities). Factory Physics is great for widgets like phones and automobiles but less so for bulk commodities like minerals and gas.
As a result I did a bunch of skimming in Parts II and III. Still, lots of great content that's good to know it exists. This will be a great reference textbook.
3 stars - based on the book's impact on me.
December 14, 2012
No one should claim to be an Operations professional (nor even an enthusiast) without having, at least, slipped through this fantastic book.
Want to read
November 19, 2021Balajis pod rec
January 9, 2024
Excellent book on manufacturing and supply chain from a physics based angle. Comparing of push versus pull systems, CONWIP, ERP and MRP systems. It’s a text book but has lots of examples and very nice explained with great visualisations and charts. Highly recommend.
Read
January 30, 2025In 1988 wewereworking as consultants at the IBM circuit board plant in Austin, Texas, helping to devise more effective production control procedures. both of us have bachelor’s degrees in physics. 2-dayindustryshortcourse on short-cycle manufacturing
forgo traditional problem-based and anecdote-based approaches
In 1990, Northwestern University initiated the Master of Management in Manufacturing (MMM) program
revealed a number of gaps between our presentation of concepts and their implementation in practice.
determine bottlenecks, compute cycle times, optimize inventories, optimize CONWIP f lows, and optimize product mix by usingalinear programming application. leanphysics.com/lpst
Optimal batch sizes
multiproduct systems
shifts from make-to-stock to make-to-order
production lines in which personnel capacity is an important constraint along with equipment capacity
Manufacturingemployedasmuchas40percentoftheU.S.workforce in the 1940s, but less than 13 percent by 2006. One is that manufacturing is being offshored by moving operations to lower-cost labor markets. The second is that it is being automated through investments that make labor more productive.
manufacturing, which includes product design, process development, plant design, capacity management, product distribution, plant scheduling, quality control, workforce organization, equipment maintenance,strategic planning, supply chain management,interplant coordination, as well as direct production
maximally exploit
identify leverage points, creatively leapfrog the competition
material requirements planning (MRP), and just-in-time (JIT)
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -George Santayana
theultimatetestofanideaisthetestoftime.
In 1776, English common law was the standard for the civilized world. America adapted this tradition, borrowed from Roman law and the Code Napoleon, and rapidly became the most litigious country in the world.
United States where there are 1,000 lawyers to every 100 engineers. Japan, on the other hand, has 1,000 engineers to every 100 lawyers (Lamm 1988, 17).
When the bubble burst in the 1990s, Japan found itself mired in an extended recession that precipitated the “Asian crisis”
steam engine, developed by James Watt in 1765 andfirst installed by John Wilkinson in his iron works in 1776. In 1781 Watt developed the technology for transforming the up-and-down motion of the drive beam to rotary motion. This made steam practical as a power source for a host of applications, including factories, ships, trains, and mines.
England during the later years of the 18th century, going so far as to organize state lotteries to raise prize money for enticing inventors. When these efforts failed repeatedly
Richard Arkwright (1732–1792)—disguised himself as a farmer and left England secretly, without even telling his mother, to avoid the English law prohibiting departure of anyone with technical knowledge.
Railroads were the spark that ignited the second industrial revolution for three reasons:
1. They were America’s first big business, and hence the first place where large-scale management hierarchies and modern accounting practices were needed.
2. Their construction (and that of the telegraph system at the same time) created a large market for mass-produced products, such as iron rails, wheels, and spikes, as well as basic commodities such as wood, glass, upholstery, and copper wire.
3. They connected the country, providing reliable all-weather transportation for factory goods and creating mass markets for products.
Asthetransportationandcommunicationsystems improved,commoditydealers,purchasingagriculturalproductsfromfarmersandselling to processors and wholesalers, began to appear in the 1850s and 1860s. By the 1870s and 1880s, mass retailers, such as department stores and mail-order houses, followed suit.
Sears and Roebuck’s sales grew from $138,000 in1891to$37,789,000in1905(Chandler1977,231).
But the key to his process was a complex and rigid scheduling system that gave departments a 15-minute window in which to deliver items for a particular order. Departments that failed to meet the schedule were fined 50 cents per item.
in 1868, America was still a minor player in steel, producing only8,500tonscomparedwithBritain’sproductionof110,000 tons. In 1872, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) turned his hand to the steel industry. He combined the new Bessemer process for making steel with the management methods of McCallum and Thompson, and he brought the industry to previously unimagined levels of integration and efficiency. By 1879, American steel production nearly equaled that of Britain. And by 1902, America produced 9,138,000 tons, compared with 1,826,000 for Britain.
his favorite dictums was, “Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves.” When Carnegie started in the steel business in the 1870s, iron rails cost $100 per ton; by the late 1890s they sold for $12 per ton (Chandler 1984, 485).
“I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master in that line. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one’s resources, and in my experience I have rarely if ever met a man who achieved preeminence in money-making—certainly never one in manufacturing—who was interested in many concerns. The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it. (Carnegie 1920, 177)”
themovingassemblyline,firstusedatFord’sHighland Park plant in 1913.
“ The thing is to keep everything in motion and take the work to the man and not the man to the work.”
In 1908, Ford followed with the legendary ModelTtouringcar,originally priced at $850. FordreducedlabortimetoproducetheModelTfrom12.5to1.5hours,andhe broughtpricesdownto$360by1916and$290bythe1920s.Fordsold730,041ModelT’s infiscalyear1916/17,roughlyone-thirdoftheAmericanautomobilemarket.Bytheearly 1920s,FordMotorCompanycommandedtwo-thirdsoftheAmericanautomobilemarket.
He failed to see the potential for producing a variety of end products from a common set of standardized parts. Moreover, his management style was that of a dictatorial owner. He never learned to trust his managerial hierarchy to make decisions of importance. Peter Drucker (1954) points to Henry’s desire to “manage without managers” as the fundamental cause of Ford’s precipitous decline in market share (from more than 60 percent down to 20 percent) between the early 1920s and World War II.
He boasted that his company could take ore from a mine and produce an automobile in 81 hours. Even allowing for storage of iron ore in winter and other inventory stocking, he claimed an average cycle time of not more than 5 days. Given this, it is little wonder that Taiichi Ohno, the originator of just-in-time systems, of whom we will have more to say in Chapter 4, was an unabashed admirer of Ford.
1. The “carrot.” Taylor proposed a “differential piece rate” system, in which workers would be paid a low rate for the first increment of work and a substantially higher rate for the next increment. The idea was to give a significant reward to workers who met the standard relative to those who did not.
2. The “stick.” Although he tried fining workers for failure to achieve the standard, Taylor ultimately rejected this approach. A worker who is unable to meet the standard should be reassigned to a task to which he is more suited and a worker who refuses to meet the standard (“a bird that can sing and won’t sing”) should be discharged.
motion study
bothveneratedandvilified
intellectually bankrupt
economicorderquantity(EOQ) and reorder point (ROP) model
Pg 81 optimal order quantity graph
the optimal order quantity increases with the square root of the setup cost or the demand rate and decreases with the square root of the holding cost. Increasing the lot size increases the average amount of inventory on hand, but reduces the frequency of ordering.
Pg 83 optimal order frequency graph
If demand is uncertain, then there are two basic approaches to take:
1. Model demand as if it were deterministic for modeling purposes and then modify the solution to account for uncertainty.
2. Explicitly represent uncertainty in the model.
Pg 101 Inventory position = on-hand inventory − backorders + orders
high demand or long replenishment lead times require more inventory for protection.
variable demand process typically requires more safety stock as protection against stockouts than does a very stable demand process.
the more expensive it is to hold inventory, the less we should hold.
the probability of rain at the company picnic tomorrow is a meaningful number, but is impossible to determine experimentally since tomorrow cannot be repeated. So when the weather forecaster says that the chance of rain tomorrow is 50 percent, this number represents a purely subjective estimate of likelihood.
A probability function is a mathematical function that takes as input an event and produces a number between zero and one (i.e., a probability).
the job of the field of statistics is the reverse of that of the field of probability. In statistics we use samples to estimate properties of a population. In probability we use properties of the population to describe the likelihood of samples.
Pegging allows the planner to see the source of demand that results in a given planned order release.
“People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a solution they do not understand.”
just-intimephilosophyofmakingonlywhatisneededwhenitisneeded.
available-to-promise calculations
In 1989 total sales for MRP II at $1.2 billion accounted for just under one-third of the total software sales in the United States. The three largest vendors are SAP, Oracle, and i2.
Because of their history of living with space and resource limitations, the Japanese are inclined toward conservation. This has made tight material control policies easier to accept in Japan than in the “throw-away society” of America.
Toyota system called heijunka. Production Smoothing—Heijunka.
If production gets ahead of the desired rate, then workers are either sent home or directed to other tasks.
two-shifting,inwhichtwoshiftsarescheduledperday,separatedbyadownperiod
old maxim “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
The analogy that many JIT writers have used is that of water in a stream with rocks on the bottom. The water represents WIP, the rocks are problems. As long as the water is high, the rocks are covered. However, when the water level is lowered, the rocks are exposed. Similarly, when the WIP level in a plant is reduced, problems, such as defects, become very noticeable.
“Newton’s law of consultants,” which states that:
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert
We know that concrete is very strong in compression but not in tension. On the other hand, steel is strong in terms of tension but not when it comes to compression. Consequently, long ago, engineers designed “reinforced concrete,” something that combines the best of both materials.
Lord Kelvin agreed, saying in 1900, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
“Dilbert” cartoons
reducing cycle time (the time for a job to go through the factory)
for many years, electricity and magnetism and optics were thought to be different fields. James Clerk Maxwell unified them with four equations.
making better use of underutilized capacity (both labor and machines).
Fed Ex makes use of a hub-and-spoke structure to facilitate rapid delivery in support of its high-service strategy.
Monte Carlo simulation software such as Arena, AutoMod, ProModel, Simscript, Witness
data exchange languages such as XML
bill of material (BOM)
WIPisequalto the product of throughput and cycle time. This relation is known as Little’s law
Whenever an upstream worker catches up with the next worker downstream, she or he will be blocked unless the station has extra equipment. Hence, it makes sense to organize the workers so as to minimize the frequency with which this happens, by placing the fastest workers downstream and the slowest workers upstream. Bartholdi and Eisenstein (1996) showed that this arrangement from slowest to fastest can significantly improve throughput
This analysis leads to the conclusion that a machine with frequent but short outages is preferable to one with infrequent but long outages, provided that the availabilities are the same.
Toyota also isolated any remaining demand variability by using a “takt time” that represents a fixed time between individual outputs. This is equivalent to maintaining a daily production quota. By producing exactly the same number of cars each day, it prevented any demand variability from affecting the plant.
Because Toyota was such a large portion of its suppliers’ demand, it had enormous leverage. Indeed, Toyota executives often sat as directors on the boards of its suppliers. This ensured that (1) Toyota got the supplies it needed when it needed them, (2) suppliers adopted variability reduction techniques “suggested” to them by Toyota, and (3) the suppliers carried any necessary buffer inventory.
lean implies that a perfect manufacturing supply chain will have: 1. Throughput exactly equal to demand 2. Full utilization of all equipment 3. Zero lead time to the customer 4. No late orders 5. Perfect quality (no scrap or rework) 6. Zero raw material and zero finished goods inventory 7. Minimum WIP (i.e., the critical WIP)
forgo traditional problem-based and anecdote-based approaches
In 1990, Northwestern University initiated the Master of Management in Manufacturing (MMM) program
revealed a number of gaps between our presentation of concepts and their implementation in practice.
determine bottlenecks, compute cycle times, optimize inventories, optimize CONWIP f lows, and optimize product mix by usingalinear programming application. leanphysics.com/lpst
Optimal batch sizes
multiproduct systems
shifts from make-to-stock to make-to-order
production lines in which personnel capacity is an important constraint along with equipment capacity
Manufacturingemployedasmuchas40percentoftheU.S.workforce in the 1940s, but less than 13 percent by 2006. One is that manufacturing is being offshored by moving operations to lower-cost labor markets. The second is that it is being automated through investments that make labor more productive.
manufacturing, which includes product design, process development, plant design, capacity management, product distribution, plant scheduling, quality control, workforce organization, equipment maintenance,strategic planning, supply chain management,interplant coordination, as well as direct production
maximally exploit
identify leverage points, creatively leapfrog the competition
material requirements planning (MRP), and just-in-time (JIT)
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -George Santayana
theultimatetestofanideaisthetestoftime.
In 1776, English common law was the standard for the civilized world. America adapted this tradition, borrowed from Roman law and the Code Napoleon, and rapidly became the most litigious country in the world.
United States where there are 1,000 lawyers to every 100 engineers. Japan, on the other hand, has 1,000 engineers to every 100 lawyers (Lamm 1988, 17).
When the bubble burst in the 1990s, Japan found itself mired in an extended recession that precipitated the “Asian crisis”
steam engine, developed by James Watt in 1765 andfirst installed by John Wilkinson in his iron works in 1776. In 1781 Watt developed the technology for transforming the up-and-down motion of the drive beam to rotary motion. This made steam practical as a power source for a host of applications, including factories, ships, trains, and mines.
England during the later years of the 18th century, going so far as to organize state lotteries to raise prize money for enticing inventors. When these efforts failed repeatedly
Richard Arkwright (1732–1792)—disguised himself as a farmer and left England secretly, without even telling his mother, to avoid the English law prohibiting departure of anyone with technical knowledge.
Railroads were the spark that ignited the second industrial revolution for three reasons:
1. They were America’s first big business, and hence the first place where large-scale management hierarchies and modern accounting practices were needed.
2. Their construction (and that of the telegraph system at the same time) created a large market for mass-produced products, such as iron rails, wheels, and spikes, as well as basic commodities such as wood, glass, upholstery, and copper wire.
3. They connected the country, providing reliable all-weather transportation for factory goods and creating mass markets for products.
Asthetransportationandcommunicationsystems improved,commoditydealers,purchasingagriculturalproductsfromfarmersandselling to processors and wholesalers, began to appear in the 1850s and 1860s. By the 1870s and 1880s, mass retailers, such as department stores and mail-order houses, followed suit.
Sears and Roebuck’s sales grew from $138,000 in1891to$37,789,000in1905(Chandler1977,231).
But the key to his process was a complex and rigid scheduling system that gave departments a 15-minute window in which to deliver items for a particular order. Departments that failed to meet the schedule were fined 50 cents per item.
in 1868, America was still a minor player in steel, producing only8,500tonscomparedwithBritain’sproductionof110,000 tons. In 1872, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) turned his hand to the steel industry. He combined the new Bessemer process for making steel with the management methods of McCallum and Thompson, and he brought the industry to previously unimagined levels of integration and efficiency. By 1879, American steel production nearly equaled that of Britain. And by 1902, America produced 9,138,000 tons, compared with 1,826,000 for Britain.
his favorite dictums was, “Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves.” When Carnegie started in the steel business in the 1870s, iron rails cost $100 per ton; by the late 1890s they sold for $12 per ton (Chandler 1984, 485).
“I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master in that line. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one’s resources, and in my experience I have rarely if ever met a man who achieved preeminence in money-making—certainly never one in manufacturing—who was interested in many concerns. The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it. (Carnegie 1920, 177)”
themovingassemblyline,firstusedatFord’sHighland Park plant in 1913.
“ The thing is to keep everything in motion and take the work to the man and not the man to the work.”
In 1908, Ford followed with the legendary ModelTtouringcar,originally priced at $850. FordreducedlabortimetoproducetheModelTfrom12.5to1.5hours,andhe broughtpricesdownto$360by1916and$290bythe1920s.Fordsold730,041ModelT’s infiscalyear1916/17,roughlyone-thirdoftheAmericanautomobilemarket.Bytheearly 1920s,FordMotorCompanycommandedtwo-thirdsoftheAmericanautomobilemarket.
He failed to see the potential for producing a variety of end products from a common set of standardized parts. Moreover, his management style was that of a dictatorial owner. He never learned to trust his managerial hierarchy to make decisions of importance. Peter Drucker (1954) points to Henry’s desire to “manage without managers” as the fundamental cause of Ford’s precipitous decline in market share (from more than 60 percent down to 20 percent) between the early 1920s and World War II.
He boasted that his company could take ore from a mine and produce an automobile in 81 hours. Even allowing for storage of iron ore in winter and other inventory stocking, he claimed an average cycle time of not more than 5 days. Given this, it is little wonder that Taiichi Ohno, the originator of just-in-time systems, of whom we will have more to say in Chapter 4, was an unabashed admirer of Ford.
1. The “carrot.” Taylor proposed a “differential piece rate” system, in which workers would be paid a low rate for the first increment of work and a substantially higher rate for the next increment. The idea was to give a significant reward to workers who met the standard relative to those who did not.
2. The “stick.” Although he tried fining workers for failure to achieve the standard, Taylor ultimately rejected this approach. A worker who is unable to meet the standard should be reassigned to a task to which he is more suited and a worker who refuses to meet the standard (“a bird that can sing and won’t sing”) should be discharged.
motion study
bothveneratedandvilified
intellectually bankrupt
economicorderquantity(EOQ) and reorder point (ROP) model
Pg 81 optimal order quantity graph
the optimal order quantity increases with the square root of the setup cost or the demand rate and decreases with the square root of the holding cost. Increasing the lot size increases the average amount of inventory on hand, but reduces the frequency of ordering.
Pg 83 optimal order frequency graph
If demand is uncertain, then there are two basic approaches to take:
1. Model demand as if it were deterministic for modeling purposes and then modify the solution to account for uncertainty.
2. Explicitly represent uncertainty in the model.
Pg 101 Inventory position = on-hand inventory − backorders + orders
high demand or long replenishment lead times require more inventory for protection.
variable demand process typically requires more safety stock as protection against stockouts than does a very stable demand process.
the more expensive it is to hold inventory, the less we should hold.
the probability of rain at the company picnic tomorrow is a meaningful number, but is impossible to determine experimentally since tomorrow cannot be repeated. So when the weather forecaster says that the chance of rain tomorrow is 50 percent, this number represents a purely subjective estimate of likelihood.
A probability function is a mathematical function that takes as input an event and produces a number between zero and one (i.e., a probability).
the job of the field of statistics is the reverse of that of the field of probability. In statistics we use samples to estimate properties of a population. In probability we use properties of the population to describe the likelihood of samples.
Pegging allows the planner to see the source of demand that results in a given planned order release.
“People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a solution they do not understand.”
just-intimephilosophyofmakingonlywhatisneededwhenitisneeded.
available-to-promise calculations
In 1989 total sales for MRP II at $1.2 billion accounted for just under one-third of the total software sales in the United States. The three largest vendors are SAP, Oracle, and i2.
Because of their history of living with space and resource limitations, the Japanese are inclined toward conservation. This has made tight material control policies easier to accept in Japan than in the “throw-away society” of America.
Toyota system called heijunka. Production Smoothing—Heijunka.
If production gets ahead of the desired rate, then workers are either sent home or directed to other tasks.
two-shifting,inwhichtwoshiftsarescheduledperday,separatedbyadownperiod
old maxim “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
The analogy that many JIT writers have used is that of water in a stream with rocks on the bottom. The water represents WIP, the rocks are problems. As long as the water is high, the rocks are covered. However, when the water level is lowered, the rocks are exposed. Similarly, when the WIP level in a plant is reduced, problems, such as defects, become very noticeable.
“Newton’s law of consultants,” which states that:
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert
We know that concrete is very strong in compression but not in tension. On the other hand, steel is strong in terms of tension but not when it comes to compression. Consequently, long ago, engineers designed “reinforced concrete,” something that combines the best of both materials.
Lord Kelvin agreed, saying in 1900, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
“Dilbert” cartoons
reducing cycle time (the time for a job to go through the factory)
for many years, electricity and magnetism and optics were thought to be different fields. James Clerk Maxwell unified them with four equations.
making better use of underutilized capacity (both labor and machines).
Fed Ex makes use of a hub-and-spoke structure to facilitate rapid delivery in support of its high-service strategy.
Monte Carlo simulation software such as Arena, AutoMod, ProModel, Simscript, Witness
data exchange languages such as XML
bill of material (BOM)
WIPisequalto the product of throughput and cycle time. This relation is known as Little’s law
Whenever an upstream worker catches up with the next worker downstream, she or he will be blocked unless the station has extra equipment. Hence, it makes sense to organize the workers so as to minimize the frequency with which this happens, by placing the fastest workers downstream and the slowest workers upstream. Bartholdi and Eisenstein (1996) showed that this arrangement from slowest to fastest can significantly improve throughput
This analysis leads to the conclusion that a machine with frequent but short outages is preferable to one with infrequent but long outages, provided that the availabilities are the same.
Toyota also isolated any remaining demand variability by using a “takt time” that represents a fixed time between individual outputs. This is equivalent to maintaining a daily production quota. By producing exactly the same number of cars each day, it prevented any demand variability from affecting the plant.
Because Toyota was such a large portion of its suppliers’ demand, it had enormous leverage. Indeed, Toyota executives often sat as directors on the boards of its suppliers. This ensured that (1) Toyota got the supplies it needed when it needed them, (2) suppliers adopted variability reduction techniques “suggested” to them by Toyota, and (3) the suppliers carried any necessary buffer inventory.
lean implies that a perfect manufacturing supply chain will have: 1. Throughput exactly equal to demand 2. Full utilization of all equipment 3. Zero lead time to the customer 4. No late orders 5. Perfect quality (no scrap or rework) 6. Zero raw material and zero finished goods inventory 7. Minimum WIP (i.e., the critical WIP)
July 29, 2025
1. Who should read this?
This work is for manufacturing managers.
People working in supply chain, operations, industrial engineers.
The author describes underlying behavior of manufacturing systems.
One may ask, Why care?
If you care about improving processes, finding ways to increase productivity in your organization.
This work might give you blueprints. Sometimes covering this, might sow seeds for you, that can help you.
2. What does this book cover?
The book covers Manufacturing through three parts, first using giving basic historical picture of Manufacturing in America. In part two, Physics of Manufacturing and in part three, practicing the principles into real world manufacturing.
Outline of the work
THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
Manufacturing in America
Inventory Control: From EOQ to ROP
The MRP Crusade
From the JIT Revolution to Lean Manufacturing
What Went Wrong
PART II
FACTORY PHYSICS
A Science of Manufacturing
Basic Factory Dynamics
Variability Basics
The Corrupting Influence of Variability
Push and Pull Production Systems
The Human Element in Operations Management
Total Quality Manufacturing
PART III
PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE
A Pull Planning Framework
Shop Floor Control
Production Scheduling
Aggregate and Workforce Planning
Supply Chain Management
Capacity Management
Synthesis-Pulling It All Together
3. What can we conclude from this work?
This work will give you, context of how manufacturing evolved from 18th century - 21st century.
I think, this work can be applied across any business units.
Even Hospitals can improve their functions, using some of the principles described.
There's incredible technical details on improving manufacturing, how to organize, manage business units.
Some of the inventions and breakthroughs, made me feel excited and happy.
For example, System of Interchangeable parts or American System of manufacturing.
When it was introduced, it made semi-skilled people more relevant and scaling manufacturing.
I'd suggest covering this, slowly and detailed, taking notes, questions.
Any other thoughts?
If you are interested specifically on Indian Manufacturing.
I'd recommend Ajay Shah, Indian Economist on Indian-Manufacturing.
He has worked closely with Indian Government, realizes issues and shares solutions.
I'd come back to this work in the future!
Highly recommended.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried
This work is for manufacturing managers.
People working in supply chain, operations, industrial engineers.
The author describes underlying behavior of manufacturing systems.
One may ask, Why care?
If you care about improving processes, finding ways to increase productivity in your organization.
This work might give you blueprints. Sometimes covering this, might sow seeds for you, that can help you.
2. What does this book cover?
The book covers Manufacturing through three parts, first using giving basic historical picture of Manufacturing in America. In part two, Physics of Manufacturing and in part three, practicing the principles into real world manufacturing.
Outline of the work
THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
Manufacturing in America
Inventory Control: From EOQ to ROP
The MRP Crusade
From the JIT Revolution to Lean Manufacturing
What Went Wrong
PART II
FACTORY PHYSICS
A Science of Manufacturing
Basic Factory Dynamics
Variability Basics
The Corrupting Influence of Variability
Push and Pull Production Systems
The Human Element in Operations Management
Total Quality Manufacturing
PART III
PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE
A Pull Planning Framework
Shop Floor Control
Production Scheduling
Aggregate and Workforce Planning
Supply Chain Management
Capacity Management
Synthesis-Pulling It All Together
3. What can we conclude from this work?
This work will give you, context of how manufacturing evolved from 18th century - 21st century.
I think, this work can be applied across any business units.
Even Hospitals can improve their functions, using some of the principles described.
There's incredible technical details on improving manufacturing, how to organize, manage business units.
Some of the inventions and breakthroughs, made me feel excited and happy.
For example, System of Interchangeable parts or American System of manufacturing.
When it was introduced, it made semi-skilled people more relevant and scaling manufacturing.
I'd suggest covering this, slowly and detailed, taking notes, questions.
Any other thoughts?
If you are interested specifically on Indian Manufacturing.
I'd recommend Ajay Shah, Indian Economist on Indian-Manufacturing.
He has worked closely with Indian Government, realizes issues and shares solutions.
I'd come back to this work in the future!
Highly recommended.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried
December 18, 2016
Great insights showing how flow processes can be quantified. Gives great insights in which factors are in play during daily tasks/processes.
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