It's About Time: The Competitive Advantage of Quick Response Manufacturing, by Rajan Suri, Productivity Press, 2010
"Time is money," as everyone know. But Prof. Rajan Suri makes a great point in new his book that time is a lot more money than most managers realize. Rajan Suri is a well-known US scholar who also has been a frequent speaker and workshop host at our MCPC conferences in the past.
His core contribution has been the development of Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM), an approach specifically designed for low-volume and customized manufacturing. I have written about QRM before in my books as one of the methods that help companies to achieve robust processes, one of the core capabilities of mass customization.
Rajan Suri's new book somehow is a "best of" his previous thinking, with a strong focus on the implementation of QRM in a company. Rajan told me that his new book summarizes the learnings he got from teaching QRM workshops to senior executives for many years.
These interactions have led to four core concepts: (i) The Power of Time – the huge impact that time has on an enterprise; (ii) Organization Structure – how to structure an organization to minimize time; (iii) System Dynamics – understanding how interactions between jobs and resources impact time and thereby how to make better decisions on capacity, lot sizes and similar issues; and (iv) Enterprise-wide application – QRM is not just a shop floor strategy, it extends across the entire enterprise including material planning and control, supply management, office operations and new product introduction.
If you are interested in the manufacturing side of mass customization and care about how to make it happen in your company, I highly recommend this book. I personally have benefited a lot from Rajan's thinking and writings.
And if you are based in Europe:
Rajan is in the Netherlands in the moment and is offering a number of workshops for the general public on QRM and its implementation in Arnhem, The Netherlands. Again: highly recommended.
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