Customer Reviews

Plant and Service Tours in Operations Management (5th Edition)

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This is a book of case studies that we used as one of our textbooks in the core Operations Management course that I took as part of getting my MBA at the University of Michigan Business School. I found the book very useful and am glad that we used it. Our texts were this book, a coursepack of other case studies and readings, and Ravi Anupinidi's (et al) "Managing Business Process Flows".

This is a book of ten case studies along with case questions and supplementary mini cases. Like all books that are compilations of case studies, they are of somewhat limited value to those who are trying to learn the field. It is hard to know what you should be getting out of the case studies without the guidance of a skilled professor.

But these cases have good illustrations, helpful questions, and they offer a broad spectrum of business processes such as continuous flow, job shop, batch flow, combined, and so on. It includes service, retail, and project management. There is a lot here to think about and discuss. If you have some experience with Operations Management and you want some more reading and you understand the purpose of case studies, this can be a good book to read. But it is better as a textbook in a classroom setting with a skilled teacher as a guide.

If you are seeking a beginning text that will explain the field and guide you through the important principles involved in Operations Management, a book of case studies, which this book is, is not appropriate. Although, if you are reading such a text and want supplementary material with a practical bent to it in order to give you some food for thinking about the principles you are learning, this book would be a great source for such material.

This book shows only a couple of processes, very specific and very old, it not a good book at all for process analysis.

This book might be useful to explore some actual production process cases, but it doesn't feel like the author understood what he wrote about. The process descriptions are not clear.