Leading Manufacturing Excellence, A Guide to State‐of‐the‐Art Manufacturing

Citation

Walley, P. (1998), "Leading Manufacturing Excellence, A Guide to State‐of‐the‐Art Manufacturing", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 208-209. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.1998.18.2.208.1

This book is a collection of mostly short articles, all of which take as a theme the range of contemporary manufacturing issues and deliver concisely the salient points of concern to managers. The book follows on from an earlier, similar volume entitled Strategic Manufacturing, by the same editor. The book is probably targeted at practitioners and possibly post‐experience students, since there appears to have been an editorial instruction to present key ideas clearly and simply, in a more prescriptive style than would normally be found in academic texts.

The book is divided into five sections, with the first section containing just two introductory chapters. Moody, herself, sets the scene with a review of global competition and a consideration of the current, practical issues which the US economy needs to address. A key point for the potential reader is that Moody writes as an American consultant writing with an American perspective of the world while trying to solve problems within the American economy. Any international comparisons in this opening chapter are between the USA, Japan and Germany, and are used to highlight where the USA needs to change to match its competitors. (Her apparent opinion of the UK economy is that it is “weakened by age” and “unable to stay in the game”, p. 18). The American theme is continued by Romeyn Everdell, in the second chapter, which looks at the history of manufacturing in the USA, from 1800 to the present day.

The second section looks at the process of strategic manufacturing planning. As examples from this section, Beckman et al. do a good job of presenting a few simple tools for analysing manufacturing tasks and tactics. Linda Sprague demonstrates the use of strategic planning grids for the development of a global manufacturing strategy. This section offers consistent advice on the strategic planning process, with little repetition between sections. However, it is not particularly integrated, so that chapters do not build on other work.

Section three looks at what are called “new strategies”, in ten separate chapters. The list includes issues of manufacturing flexibility, people development, quality circles, time‐based competition and kaizen. I don’t know if any of these themes are a hangover from the first book, but many of these ideas cannot be described as “new”, unless the definition includes ideas which have been kicking around for 15 or 20 years and longer. For example, Michael Harding has produced a well written chapter with the title of “Profitable purchasing”. It is full of checklists and summaries which many practitioners may find of interest. However, I would argue that a summary of new issues should consider supply chain structure and network development, in preference or in addition.

The next section contains three articles, labelled as “management focus”, which take an overview of the strategy development process. Schmenner talks about “seven deadly sins” of manufacturing, which gives some prescriptive advice about how manufacturing should be managed, but he does this in a highly interesting and accessible manner. No doubt that practitioners will like his golfing analogy of hooking and slicing their way down the product/process matrix. I liked the approach taken by Frank Leonard, in his chapter on the integration of business and manufacturing strategy, who takes an uncompromising position when he describes the roles of the different business functions in the strategy development process. His critique of the marketing function as a “pervasive influence that is too often assumed to be positive…” is one of the many comments which I would like my post‐experience students to read. This chapter will set off many a debate.

The book concludes with a chapter which discusses the role of managers as change agents and a separate illustrative case study on conversion of a job shop to JIT production. Both these chapters cover the basics quite well, but do not go beyond what you would find in more conventional textbooks.

The majority of the time, I do not regard the chapters as especially deep analyses of their subjects, but there are sections which put across key ideas effectively. Some sections are simply too short to present anything of substance. Academics will not find the approach sufficiently critical and there is little reference to other work to encourage further analysis. However, practitioners will find this an accessible book which conveys the basic concepts well, in a number of useful areas of manufacturing strategy. For student audiences, there are a number of chapters which they will find of interest and would be good additions to a manufacturing strategy course reading list. As such, it can be recommended as further reading.