No company is built to last, argues world-renowned manufacturing guru Richard J. Schonberger. In this devastating indictment of current manufacturing practices, Schonberger submits a four-part revolutionary plan to solve the manufacturing crisis for good. From his statistically reliable database of 500 top global manufacturers, Schonberger finds that by the critical worldwide standard of lean production-shedding inventories -General Motors, General Electric, Toyota, and other world leaders have stopped improving. He presents powerful evidence that in recent years record profits have covered up waste and weakness. Clearly a lack of will to renew and recover from the natural tendency toward regression and erosion, it is more than a matter of garden-variety complacency-devastating as that is in this new era of global hypercompetition. Schonberger asserts that the inclination of industry leaders to engage in stock hyping to gain a quick fix from the dot-com explosion has distracted attention from "the basics" of world-class excellence.
Among other villains contributing to the crisis, Schonberger contends, are newly hired managers with no trial-by-fire experience; bad equipment, systems, and job design; and retention of unprofitable customers and anachronistic command-and-control managerial hierarchies. What to do? Just as he introduced the legendary "just-in-time" framework to the West in the 1980s, Schonberger prescribes strong medicine to cure our current malaise. Find your blind spots, he says. Roll confusing, time-sapping initiatives into a master program that is immune from "the flavor of the month." Put lean into heavy-handed control systems. Develop products and standardize processes at "home base" for ease of migrating volume production anywhere in the world.
Table of Contents:
Contents Preface 1 Complacency 2 Renewal 3 Competitiveness 4 Programs and Their Half-lives 5 Success 6 Performance Management: The Human Side 7 Performance Management: Control Without Controls 8 Focused Form and Structure 9 Focus Within 10 Strategy of Global Proportions 11 Continuous Improvement Up-to-Date 12 Manufacturing's Burdens-and Responses 13 Systems: Some Come with an "E" Appendix 1: The Strong and the Weak Appendix 2: WCP International Benchmarking Study Participants and Global Benchmarking Partners Appendix 3: Two Elements of the World Class by Principles (WCP) International Benchmarking Project Notes Index
About the Author :
Richard J. Schonberger, PhD, is president of Schonberger & Associates of Seattle. He is the author of more than 170 articles and papers, a twelve-volume video set, and several books.
Review :
Gordon B. LanktonPresident and CEO, Nypro, Inc.
Outlines new techniques for achieving world-class performance. If you are convinced you have found the answer to keeping ahead of your competitors, you had better read "Let's Fix It!"
J. Randolph ZookPresident and CEO, Atlantic Envelope Company
New, simple paths to better results....Guides frontline managers in their quest for rapid, continuous, attainable improvement. This is a road map to sustainable competitive advantage!
Michael JoyceVice President, LM21 Operating Excellence, Lockheed Martin Corp.
Serves as a perfect chronicle of thought that picks up where Ohno and Shingo left off and takes us to the modern challenges of globalization and the Internet.
Professor H. Thomas Johnson2001 Shingo Research Prize Laureate, and coauthor of "Profit Beyond Measure"
Schonberger breaks new ground "again!,.".Focuses readers on research-based principles of manufacturing management that will shape excellent companies in the hypercompetitive economy of the twenty-first century.
Thomas L. ReeceChairman, President, and CEO, Dover Corporation
Will be widely read throughout Dover and help take us to the next level in our never-ending quest to become World Class in everything we do.
