Job Shop Leaders: Small Wins From a Factory Life
"If high volume production is heavy metal, then make to order is jazz."
This book is about job shops. Inside is a combination of stories and practical tips from my experience. It’s not theory. This is how I lost money, made money, kept my job or got promoted. These are all the things I dug through the literature trying to find answers to.
Job shops can be many different types of businesses. Factories, distributors, and government offices could all be considered job shops. Job shops are all those places where the work you do, and the volume of work varies from day to day, even custom design businesses where every piece is unique.
There were seven challenges I struggled with that I couldn’t find adequate answers to. We talk about it here by addressing: controlling lead times, eliminating knack points, Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), solving dynamic capacity, getting to full kit, order unevenness (Mura), and Minimum Viable Process (MVP)
If you work in high volume mass production this probably isn't written for you. If you've never lost a night's sleep trying to understand how your business works, put this down. If you like big words and highly technical descriptions I’m not your guy.
This book is for the searchers. I’m looking forward to this. Come on inside.
Blog
Measuring Production In Job Shops #1
Forward this email to a friend: http://us4.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=686d17e79aeff2086db1a53f8&id=06005b163f&e=[UNIQID] Like most make to order factories, we had problems: with measurement, on time shipments, and meeting schedule. The facility was the size of a football field. Over four hundred skilled and semi-skilled employees scampered between eleven assembly lines, packed side by side under one roof, barely keeping pace with…
Keeping A Notebook
It’s been a little bit since we talked, hasn’t it? Well, we’ve got a few minutes before the shift starts. Let me tell you a story. I started keeping a production notebook in 2012. I did everything wrong. It was too small. No index. I left meetings without noting key ideas. I failed to record…