Customer Reviews

Fast Track to Waste-Free Manufacturing: Straight Talk from a Plant Manager (Shopfloor Series)

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I've been researching and reviewing dozens of books on Suzaki, Womack and Jones, Liker, Hamel and Prahalad, Treacy and Wiersema, Womack, Jones and Roos, Schonberger, Imai,Shingo,Monden, et. al. This book is the first one I've found that provides both rationale for change and, most importantly, step by guidance on "how to" implement the necessary changes. Written in a style that is at times reminiscent of "The Goal", Mr. Davis offers suggestions, recommendations,and guidelines in an easily readable 264 pages that contain no unnecessary jargon, disconcerting statistics, nor is it part of a doctoral thesis meant to impress the academic community. One gets the feeling from reading this book that Mr. Davis has actually "been there"; that he has worked in a career in manufacturing and is truly speaking from experience. Take my word for it; if you want to read one book or recommend one book to your subordinates on the subject, this is the one! I am pleased to write this review and would be willing to communicate with anyone regarding my impressions

Having worked as a facilitator, manager, and consultant transitioning fortune 500 manufacturing companies from batch to lean manufacturing operations since 1991, my hat is off to Mr. John Davis on his superb book "Fast Track to Waste Free Manufacturing." In my travels and teachings I have been exposed to hundreds of teachers, managers, and authors who profess to be experts in the tools, techniques, and principles of the Toyota Production System and lean organizational skills. However, few if any, have the true experience of being in a position responsible for the success of failure of its implementation. Having had the privilege of working with Mr. Davis in the early 90's as he developed his expertise in waste free manufacturing, I can attest that in this book, Mr. Davis does what he always did best. "He walks the talk." In this book, he takes you on a journey of successful implementation of waste free manufacturing and profitability. This is a must read for managers and associates who understand and belief in the tools, principles, and techniques of a waste free manufacturing organiztion and want to learn how to do it. In this book, Mr. Davis demonstrates the importance of focus, commitment, communications, and leadership in transforming a batch organization to a waste free, profitable organization. "For when a true leader has successfully completed his task....They will say we did it ourselves.

John Davis takes a simple step-by-step approach in describing the transformation of a plant from a typical troubled operation to a lean operation. Davis focuses on basics and "how-to", not buzz words and jargon. Davis provides a framework that can be used by any plant manager who is trying to implement lean manufacturing concepts in a 'traditional' manufacturing setting. This can be used in high volume opertaions but is especially useful in low volume or job shop manufacturing, where the Toyota model with its manic focus on tact time is not always applicable. Davis focuses on workplace organization (using a 6C model which is an adaptation of the familiar 5S concept) as the basis of any lean transformation. This perspective alone is worth the price of the book because many lean efforts fail due to lack of fundamental workplace organization. If you are a plant manager or GM tasked with turning around a low performing operation, or you simply want a primer on Lean, this is the one to buy.

I expected this to be written in a practical, bare-knuckels style similar to "The Goal". There are a few narrative pages like this scattered about the book (which are the highlight in my opinion), but less than 10% of the book is devoted to these pages. The bulk of the book is a clutter of every hackneyed acronym manufacturing consultants have used over the last couple of decades: Takt time, Toyota Production System (TPS), one piece flow, Workplace organization, U-flow, Error-free processing, JIT, Pull manufacturing, kanban, kaizen, SMED, contiunous improvement, lean manufacturing, 5S, you name the buzzword - its in there. The author seems to revel in this verbal masturbation. The book basically glosses over these flavor-of-the-month manufacturing concepts (assuming a level of knowledge of each) and compares them to each other. There is very little explanation of how to implement them, or how they were implemented in any of the companies the author says he worked for. There is a refreshing honesty that some of these concepts are useless (which you already know if manufacturing is your field) The book 'feels' very much like the work of a consultant and NOT a plant manager.
I found almost nothing useful that I could apply to the small company where I work.