Customer Reviews

Lean Manufacturing Systems and Cell Design

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Lean Manufacturing Systems and Cell Design by Black and Hunter is an interesting book because of it's brillant insights usually followed by totally wrong statements.

Given the title I assumed the book had to do with Lean Manufacturing but the authors never refer to the 7 or 8 wastes, or other tenets of Lean. They have observed some very good, lean, systems and have some very good observations about cells but they also confuse takt time with cycle time (very different things); they mix the terms cell and cellular even though they are two different things; they seem to think 5S is about hosekeeping (which is an outcome of 5S, not the purpose); they call kanban a buffering system and insist buffers are necessary (buffers keep product moving but they slow down problem solving); they use the term chaku-chaku but they incorrectly describe it which causes me to believe they do not know what it is; and many other errors in what Lean is; what cellular manufacturing is; and how to create them.

I can not recommend this book because it has too many errors to be safely used to create improvement and that is a shame because it does have some observations and statements that are correct and rarely printed.

The lean manufacturing book for practtioner which was written by the manufacturing expertise.