Richard J. Schonberger - Böcker

This casebook, designed as a companion volume to Richard J. Schonberger's World Class Manufacturing: The Lessons of Simplicity Applied, contains 26 cases that let students of WCM concepts solve actual JIT and TQC implementation problems in a wide variety of manufacturing and corporate settings.For readers with specific concerns, each case lists the topics covered and each case includes questions on issues that companies commonly face in implementing WCM concepts.

This book tells 101 stories of company efforts to implement the many aspects of flow manufacturing -- including such topics as just-in-time production, total quality control, reorganization of factories into product-focused or customer-focused cells, plants-in-a-plant, material flows by the simplicity of visual kanban, supplier partnerships, quick setup of equipment, cross-training and job rotation of the work force, and many more. The 101 mini-case studies – dubbed "caselets" -- include 26 non-U.S. companies from 12 countries and cover a wide swath of industrial sectors, and include many well-known corporations such as Apple, Campbell Soup, Honeywell, and Boeing.From the 1980s to the present, the author has been taking the message of process improvement and customer-focused excellence far and wide. Most of these travels, usually in connection with delivering a seminar, include brief factory tours in which he compiled detailed notes and then organized them as brief reports — his unvarnished analysis or take on what they do well and what needs improvement. In the main the reports were then sent back to the hosts of the plant tour. These factory tours and these follow-up reports form the basis of the large majority of this book’s caselets.Many of the caselets bring to life process-improvement methodologies in detail. With lots of caselets to draw from, the readers will find vivid examples of similar companies and processes within their respective industries. For example, the caselets often include applications of advanced concepts in cost management, employee training, performance management, supply chains, and logistics as well as applications of plant layout, quick setup, material handling, quality assurance, scheduling, ergonomics, and flow analysis.

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.

Richard Schonberger, in his fourth and most important book yet, introduces a powerful new concept: that the many links between and within the four main business functions -- design, operations, accounting, and marketing -- form a continuous "chain of customers" that extends to those who buy the product or service. Everyone has a customer -- the next department, office, shop, or person -- at the hundreds of pioneering companies Schonberger has studied throughout the world.Schonberger demonstrates the universality of customer wants: Both the next and final customers want ever better quality, quicker response, greater flexibility, and lower cost. This condition provides a common strategy and calls for common methods to be used across the organization. Every employee is a data gatherer and analyst, unearthing more and better ways to provide for these customers' wants -- before the competition does so.As the new thinking and methods permeate every comer of the firm, they topple departmental walls and adjust gang-like mind-sets and "them-versus-us" attitudes. Performance is no longer measured by internal costs but by improvement as seen by the next customer; direct control of causes generally replaces after-the-fact control of costs. Design is brought out of isolation. Finally, with the rest of the firm reoriented toward customer service, marketing escapes from a "negative" mode -- covering up for failures -- to a positive one -- crowing about the firm's competence and ability to improve.With the close attention to detail for which he has become famous, Schonberger constructs a blueprint for unifying corporate functions, brilliantly describing the new microcosms that will make up the company of the 1990s -- focused teams of multi-skilled, involved employees arranged according to the way the work flows or the service is provided -- that compose the chain of customers. Aetna, for example, is organizing customer-focused teams that cut across underwriting and the administrative functions. At Hewlett-Packard, teams of marketing, manufacturing, and R&D people have already gone through several iterations of "activity-based costing", which provides product designers with previously unavailable data for shaving costs throughout product life cycles. And at Du Pont, even production people on the factory floor are involved in assessing competitors' product quality and probable costs and methods. Through these and hundreds of other real company examples, Schonberger shows how the customer-driven chain of action leads directly to the kinds of bottom-line performance that have been so elusive to executives who manage at a distance "by the numbers" -- namely, higher profits, greater security, and gains in market share at the expense of the laggard competion.

The publication contains a selection of the best double-blind reviewed papers presented, discussed and revised by participants of the 1st International Conference on Value Chain Management in Austria, Steyr, May 2011. The Value Chain Management (VCM) Conference presents scientific insights relevant to management as well as their translation into the practice of management. The conference focus is on the demand chain i.e. sales, production, purchasing, logistics, performance measurement and customer value management. The authors present analytical and conceptual articles as well as empirical studies showing multidisciplinary and intercultural approaches towards solving relevant open problems.