Product Description

How do companies in high labor cost countries manage to remain competitive? In western manufacturing, the more manual a process, the more severe the competitive handicap of high wages. Full automation would make labor costs irrelevant but remain impractical in most industries. Most successful manufacturing processes in advanced economies are neither fully manual nor fully automatic -- they involve interactions between small numbers of highly skilled people and machines that account for the bulk of the manufacturing costs and thereby remain competitive.

In Working with Machines: The Nuts and Bolts of Lean Operations With Jidoka, author Michel Baudin explains how performance differences that can be observed between factories are due to the way people use the machines -- from the human interfaces of individual machines to the linking of machines into cells, the management of monuments and common services, autonomation, maintenance, and production control.

This compelling book:

Emphasizes the importance of the "Jidoka" pillar of the Toyota Production System, which is engineering the way people work with machines. Deals with the art of bringing groups of machines together into "cells." Addresses the problematic issues associated with "monuments" - those machines that provide services for production lines across a broad variety of products, but cannot be organized into cells. Compares automation as it has been developed in the US, as a stand-alone discipline with a lean manufacturing approach, to the management of automated systems implemented before a plant started its lean conversion. This book provides manufacturing managers and engineers, lean champions and consultants with strategies and tools to make the technical and managerial decisions that turn working with machines into a lasting business success.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #268364 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Review
"I have found this book very informative on the management of machines. It includes many new ideas and approaches on the management of machine engineering…. it is easy to read and… it will help many readers understand how to incorporate the roles of machines into modern-day management."
Imai Masakki, Founder, Kaizen Institute 04/17/07

From the Publisher
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About the Author
Since 1987, Michel Baudin has consulted on lean manufacturing implementation for such clients as Honda of America, Unilever, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and National Semiconductor. His prior experience includes serving as director of the Menlo Park Technology Center of Teknekron Corporation, giving technical support for CIM installations in Japan on behalf of Consilium Corporation, designing the MS/X OnTime production scheduler marketed by Tyecin Systems, and implementing the OPT scheduling system in two General Motors Factories.