Manufacturers Books

This is one of the rare books on subject that is passing experience of seasoned professional rather than pushing through usual 'DIY get rich quick' hype.

Very important invention marketing nuances are described in detail and different strategies highlighted in detail. Only here, author sometimes explains two opposite strategies in parallel, without pointing which details belongs to which strategy.

One should prise the author for having down to earth business approach. In the very beginning of the book he points out that, if the costs like patenting, prototyping etc. are higher than potential royalties one should rethink the whole exercise. On the end of the day only one in thousand inventions becomes successful in the marketplace.

This book is an excellent reference for anyone in the industry even considering making standard operating procedures or improving their software process. The attention to detail is incredible, a very valuable book.

Note: This book and "The Victorian Design Book" (ISBN 0-9691019-6-1, A Complete Guide to Victorian House Trim) are both reprints of the "Universal Design Book, Chicago". Both contain listings adopted by the Wholesale Sash, Door and Blind Manufacturers' Association. This book is a reprint from a 1902 price listing, "The Victorian Design Book" is from a 1903 price listing, but both appear to match in price. Both books, while organized slightly differently do appear to contain the same items, illustrations and prices, with very little difference in content.

While both books use some color, "The Victorian Design Book" has additional color plates where the "Turn of the Century Decorative Millwork" uses black and white. Either book would be an excellent reference for historically accurate millwork from 1902-1903 (but you won't need both).

Very good chapter on operation and maintenance of large IT systems for FDA compliance. Latest GAMP case study on IT infrastructure. Excellent case study on networks.

Excellent book. Easy to read and understand for the basics of verification and validation throughout the product lifecycle.

In "Working at Cross-Purposes", the authors help distributors and suppliers improve their relationships with each other. The authors learned through their research findings--drawn from responses from distributors to a comprehensive written DREF survey as well as candid interviews with distributors--that thinking a relationship was "win-win" could be dangerous. The more time both partners spend managing the relationship, the more beneficial the economics. Spend less time, get fewer rewards. This book is written with both distributors and suppliers in mind and both partners can benefit. Anyone, at any level, within an organization who is interested in preserving relationships with partners will benefit from exploring the ideas presented. Sales managers, product marketing managers, or local supplier reps can have a significant impact on the relationship, because it is here that the players do not always understand the big-picture impact of their decisions.

For any individual working in an operations oriented field this book can be a valuable tool for learning more about the Toyota Way and Lean manufacturing.

Book seller presented accurate information regarding the condition and quality of the book. Book receipt time was excellent and well within the timeframe given to the purchaser. Thanks for the great service.

This is an excellent book to uncover the beautiful simplicity of the Toyota Production System. Although simple is always best, with complicated cars, machines and huge sums of parts, it sometimes is lost in the jungle of the manufacturing floor. This is where a company's leadership is key to the success of the lean manufacturing endeavor. Obviously, the Toyoda family had a long line of brilliant individuals that have not only kept the principles alive, but continued to drive the company to record growth and profits. This book is very good for showing the way, but there is a lot more detail requred to actually implement the system. As an introduction to the system and the philosophies, this book is excellent. If you are looking to implement lean manufacturing, you will need more than one book to accomplish the task, and you will need leadership within your organization that is willing to change and embrace a new way. Most company efforts will collapse due to managment not having the stamina it takes to fully change their plant floor, their material flow and their processes. With the Toyota Production System, you are never "done" but you continue to look for improvement forever.

The Toyota Way certainly does provide the foundation of using operational excellence as a strategic weapon. With increased competition, companies are continuously challenged to achieve operational excellence in a better way than its competitors, and use this as their strategic weapon or at least ensure that they are meeting/exceeding industry standard in this area. This book contributed many ideas to my MBA dissertation, in creating a profit for an insurance company that had been making continuous losses for a number of years. The continuous process flow mentioned in the book was adopted and resulted in significant cost savings, by eliminating certain processes and improving the quality control.

This book has also influenced me to purchase a Toyota Fortuner, moving from the Honda brand that I had driven for years.

Judith Kean, FCCA

I read this book when it was first published in 2004 and recently re-read it, curious to know how well Jeffrey Liker's explanation of Toyota's management principles and lean production values have held up. My conclusion? Very well.

No good purpose would be served by merely listing the 14 management principles, out of context. Liker devotes a separate chapter to each, carefully explaining not only what it is but also how it guides and informs everyone at all levels and in all areas of the Toyota organization. What Liker also accomplishes, and what cannot be adequately summarized in a review such as this, is to explain how all 12 principles are interdependent. Together, they serve as the company's DNA. In the Preface, he recalls asking Fujio Cho (President of Toyota Motor Company) what was unique about his company's remarkable success. His answer was quite simple: "The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements...But what is important is having all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner." To understand Toyota's success, therefore, it is important to understand that lean production is not a methodology, it is literally a way of life.

The 14 principles are divided into four sections:

Having a long-term philosophy that drives a long-term approach to building a learning organization

Absolute faith that the right process will produce the right results

Adding value to the organization by developing its people and partners

Continuously solving root problems to drive organizational learning

As Liker points out, it is important to understand that the Toyota Production System is not the Toyota Way. TPS is the most systematic and highly developed example of what the principles of the Toyota Way can accomplish. The Toyota Way consists of the foundational principles of the Toyota culture, which allows the TPS to function so effectively.

How does lean improvement differ from traditional process improvement? "Briefly, wheras the traditional approach to process improvement focuses on local efficiencies, in a lean improvement initiatuve, most of the progress comes from a large number of non-value steps being squeezed out. For example, overproduction, delays, and wasted motion. In fact, the ultimate goal of lean manufacturing is to apply the ideal of one-piece flow to all business operations, from product design to launch, order taking, physical production, and shipment."Some of the differences are subtle but no less significant.

To repeat, anyone can read this book and then uncerstand what the Toyota Way is. Possessing a gourmet chef's recipe, however, does not ensure that a gourmet meal will be prepared. Toyota has its own way. Other companies must develop theirs based on their own "roots." In other words, lead from their traditional strengths but not be limited by them. In fact, companies may need to re-invent themselves, not once but several times. That is what Toyota did...and continues to do. Use operational excellence as a strategic weapon and the rewards and results will far outweigh the great effort required.

That said, Liker does provide 13 "general tips." The first is to begin with action in the technical system and then follow quickly with cultural change. Other suggestions include learning by doing first and training second, using value stream mapping to develop future state visions to help "learn to see," and being opportunistic in identifying opportunities for big financial impacts. They are provided with brief but precise explanations on Pages 302-307.

It remains for each person who reads this book to determine which of the 14 management principles are most relevant to her or his own enterprise, and then to determine how to translate each into effective action. Presumably Liker agrees with me that most companies have 3-5 areas in which "lean" initiatives are urgently needed. Developing an execution plan can be tricky, however, because all business transaction involve a process of some kind and improvement of one process inevitably has a direct impact on several others. Here's one possibility, suggested to me by a COO to whom I gave a copy of this book: Read the final chapter, Chapter 22, first. It's title is "Build Your Own Lean Learning Enterprise, Borrowing from the Toyota Way." He thinks that will provide an appropriate framework within which to proceed from Gary Convis' Foreword and Liker's Preface to the conclusion of Chapter 21. That suggestion is worth consideration.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Liker's Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way as well as Matthew Mays' The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation, David Magee's How Toyota Became Toyota: Leadership Lessons from the World's Greatest Car company, and What Is Lean Six Sigma? co-authored by Michael L. George, David Rowlands, and Bill Kastle.

The Sears and Roebuck catalog has been a huge help in writing my historical romance set in the 1890s. There are saddles, surreys, and patent medicines. This visual aid has made it so much easier for me to give an accurate depiction of the times.

Imagine having an invention which would allow you to review various products from the comfort of your own home. An invention which would enable you to purchase food, clothing, books, tools, medicines, transportation, furniture and virtually any other consumer need. An invention which would permit you to choose various delivery options which varied by cost and speed. Oh and by the way the year is 1897. After reading this book I have to say that the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue was truly the Internet of its day. The book lists literally thousands of items which could all be purchased from the Sears Roebuck Company. Many of the items are farming equipment and provide a look at what was needed to raise food in the small family ran farms of the day as opposed to our world of largely corporate farming. The drawings of the home entertainment options available show how much easier we have it today. The product descriptions, especially of the medical products are eye opening (you could actually buy opium) and the overall feel is that a person in the late 1800s, even if stuck in a small rural town, truly had access to the world provided he had a copy of the Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

This is such a great look into turn of century catalogue shopping. You'll be shocked at cheap things like violins and three piece suits used to be. For history or shopping buffs, this is a really, really neat buy.

I love it! It is fun to look at the the prices of the items that were sold back at the turn of the century.

This book is utterly fascinating for those who hold any sort of interest in bygone times. While not a step-by-step guide, it inadvertantly thrusts the reader into the role of a home owner of limited means in the late 1800s. You find yourself shopping, suckered in by the richly worded item desciptions and enticed by the promises of "best on the market," "guaranteed for a lifetime," and "will cure all diseases of the nervous system."

Unconsciously, you create your own little shopping list and envision a home where the husband builds everything from the buggy to the bathrooms while the wife prepares all the meals and pretties herself with skin whiteners and hair lotions.

I am so glad to have bought this catalogue. I use it as a writing prompt for my high school students, to encourage creative and analytical thought, and they delight in it. I implore everyone to investigate this book.

This book is an invaluable resource for any business or collector dealing in silver (coin, silverplate, or sterling). This was a gift I purchased for a collector's library and the third reprint I've purchased over the years. A must-have book for the silver research library.

This is a "must have" for anyone who collects, sells or loves sterling silver.

this is the book to have if you are an antique silver collector. Wonderful addition to my silver library

I got this book through inter-library loan on the advice of an online silver seller and hobbyist? expert? We are restoring an 1800s farmhouse in New York state, and have found various bits of silver and pottery and other things. Everything is quite worn and dirty from being underground for decades. I did a number of online searches but it was this book which enabled me to identify, just in the course of one afternoon, two pieces of cutlery -- one old silver, one less old silverplate, and be fairly secure in the ID because this book tells a bit about some of the marks, such as their locale.

No resource is infinite. This book shows many, many marks, and the text tells of the history and relationships among many of the manufacturers. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone else doing research. Don't forget your loupe or other strong magnifier!

This is a good book for American Hallmarks BUT, it is extremely out-of-date. Also, many entries do not have a picture of the mark, making identification difficult. There must be a better book out there somewhere!

This book is exactly what I was looking. It provides an detailed overview of Lean Manufacturing, from its history to examples of implementation in US manufacturing facilities today.

If you are looking for a detailed overview and want to understand what lean manufacturing is all about, then I highly recommend this book. I have passed it on to our CEO (with specific sections marked) and it has sparked great discussion concerning our manufacturing methods.

This book covers a number of great insights into the journey to leanness. It has the unique angle of having its case studies written by the people from the companies profiled in the studies. This gives a first hand review of the accomplishments and roadblocks that are part of becoming lean by those that went through them. Becoming Lean also gives accounts from people with personal experience from working for Toyota while they transplanted to North America to how the Japanese school system compares to and contrasts from the American school systems. In general, this book gives an excellent understanding that only a first-hand account can do. If you want to learn what it means to become lean this book is a must and should be used as a reference book while going through the lean transformation!

This is the real stuff - not academic theory but real examples of "lean" written by the people that made it happen. The concluding chapter on "what we have learned about becoming lean" pulls it all together in a neat package. This is a must read for anyone who enjoyed Womack's book on "Lean Thinking". We have applied these learnings at this company with great results.

BECOMING LEAN
Probably one of the better "lean" production books, because most books will tell you what lean production is. We have all heard the buzzwords, kaizen, quality circles, empowerment, kanban, benchmarking. but one is still left with their peculiar situation. There is always the thought that this particular company or industry is does not lend itself to lean production and is the exception to the rule. "Becoming Lean" is the account of some diverse companies on the road to lean production. The attempt of make each company fit a certain production model and achieve its goal. I recommend this book for teaching by example, instead of dealing with just theory.

"Becoming Lean" delivers the promise of its title by documenting case studies of successful lean implementations in diverse industries. The step-by-step accounts of the implementors (CEOs, Presidents, and consultants) identify successful strategies and execution, as well as problems encountered during the implementations.

Having worked in manufacturing for 29 years, I'm ecstatic that American companies are now understanding that we engineer and manufacture products in a global market. The only way to ensure long term survival is to deliver the highest quality at an affordable price (and cost), precisely when the customer wants it!

Lean Manufacturing is the only way to achieve ALL of these fundamental requirements. "Becoming Lean" provides the tools to get your company either started, or back on track, on the road to Lean success.