Purchasing Books

Knod and Schonberger have written the best general text available on production/operations management at the undergraduate level.The text has very good chapters on Capacity Planning(aggregate capacity planning),Scheduling,Design(reliability and serviceability),Quality and process control(especially pp.318-322 on mean and range charts and pp.327-330 on process capability analysis),Inventory control,Timing(waiting lines and queues),and PERT.A minor weakness is that a discussion of the use of the Beta distribution in PERT analysis is omitted from the book.Anyone who covers this book throughly will be very well prepared to take senior level undergraduate courses and graduate level courses in operations management.

Fairly good survey book. Having an undergrad operations background, I found this book mirrored the strengths and weaknesses of a more detailed operations curriculum. Book is best in framework and quantitative model overviews, weaker on softer subjects like staffing, project management, & holistic quality.

If your MBA professor offers Schonberger as the answer to 21st Century Operations Management, seek a transfer quick. Obsessed with a touchy-feeling "quality paradigm", there is not enough meat here to frighten off the most zealous vegetarian. The chapters on "managing projects" and "facilities management" are especially shallow.

After reading this book on trading the OEX, I had a better insight as to how this instrument works. Personally, I'm still considering whether or not I should start trading the OEX. This book helped me a lot in my decision. If you have any interest in OEX trading, you should start by readin this book.

On reading further -- each chapter has been exended to include later trades (1990 - 93) and some strategic changes to the approaches are suggested. The book is interesting reading, some of the comments are good (amusing) but not always helpful in trading. The discussion of SP500 futures should deter many a would-be trader, I would think.

If you have a copy of "Taking Profit from the OEX" by Arthur Darack then just re-read it. This book, supposedly published in 1995, is just a re-hash of the previous book. Even the chapter headings have the same name, and the same content. If nothing has changed since the first one (198?) then why change the title. Stan Graham

For anyone in the leasing business, this is a wonderful book to own. It is a complete training course in equipment leasing. The author has the only good explanation I could ever find of concepts such as leveraged leases. This book is a _must_ for anyone in the equipment leasing industry.

I wish that the author had worked out a few examples with the reader on cash flows and pricing of leases. There is some math that is not very clear to the first time reader. I also wish that there was some more information about vendor leasing and lease origination.

Regardless, this is one heck of a training course in leasing for under 20 dollars. If you are in any way involved with leasing, this is money well spent.

This book is more about the benefits and features of leasing. It does not give the reader any information on structuring a lease. The only benefit that I saw in reading this book was that it did inform me about different lease types.

In many instances, Gordon seems to be protective of sellers although the first word in the title is "Buyers." As a buyer, I am frustrated with her biased advice, e.g., leave positive feedback for the seller so that they will do the same for you. A buyer completes his/her responsibilities first, that is, to pay. Once done, the logical step would be for the seller to rate that buyer. Then when the piece of jewelry is received--if it is received--the buyer should rate the seller on whether the piece was sold and shipped with integrity.

This book can be interesting even if you have utterly no intention of buying or selling jewelry on eBay. Who would have thought when eBay started up, selling trinkets, that jewelry would rapidly form a multimillion dollar niche? Not a small niche at all.

Gordon goes into the practical details for both buyers and sellers. The book's paramount theme seems to be how to avoid getting ripped off. Unsurprising, considering the high valued nature of the items. For professional sellers, detecting fake buyers is vital to staying solvent. Whereas real buyers tend not to do this as a profession. So while a buyer might suffer a loss due to a fake seller, it's not like being put out of business.

But, if you follow her guidelines and use some common sense, you should have good chances of a successful transaction.

I was disappointed. The material in this book is incomplete and dated. Don't bother.

This book is really cool. It tells you how to search and compare cars online. Allows everyone who is interested in buying a new or used car a way to inform themselves on everything from the safety to the best prices. How to find car clubs, speciality items - everything except how to find a date. Really cool book!

This book delivers answers to questions you may not have even considered before buying a business. It is an easy to understand, step-by-step practical approach to a highly involved process, and could save one thousands of dollars and many long hours of disappointment. Tuller delivers the goods from the start of the buying process to the finish, giving practical examples all along the way. Highly recommended!

The author should concentrate less on the quantity of books he throws together and more on the quality of the material. As a business broker, I felt the book was full of unrelated tangents and only occasionally provided the reader with useful insight.

I'm not sure if the author believes his style is better or just wanted to be different than traditional texts. Either way, it fails. Specifically, he does not explicitly state most formulas. He likes to embed the individual terms within paragraphs of text rather than clearly define the variables. The case studies used drone on and on. Ok, I understand that in real life we are given more information than we need, but jeez, no need to fill droves of pages with irrelevant information. Makes me believe he had a minimum book page quota to meet.

And the student CD was clearly an after thought or a ploy to charge a premium as there is very little on the CD and none of it usefull. Where are the homework data tables? Student notes?

This book is a big disapointment.

Excellent to learn about Supply Chain, it is very complete, it covers all the areas of Supply Chain

A couple of years ago, a friend and I decided to try our hand at the surplus business that everyone was talking about. He ordered a course from a company called ACL and after months of frustration with the material and company, we almost gave up the idea. We ran across Mr. Kulesza's book, "Hidden Wealth: How to find, buy, sell and broker surplus and liquidated goods" and fearing it might be another scam, we almost didn't buy it. What a mistake that would have been! After we read the book several times, the whole concept of the industry suddenly became clear to us. We were on the wrong track all along, thus our frustration. Since then we've built up a great closeout/surplus business that supports both our families very well. When we heard that Mr. Kulesza released a new fourth edition, "Hidden Wealth: How to reap huge profits from surplus goods and equipment in the 21st century" we had to have it. He outdid himself with this updated edition. Anyone wanting down-to-earth, no bull, step by step information about surplus must read this book.

Contrary to what one reviewer wrote, there is nothing in the book about antiques! Don't know where that came from. And the text is not large...it's small and packed on pages with no filler material. A meaner, leaner version of the previous edition.

I'll forever be grateful to the author for his fine work and dedication to the industry. There's a good reason this book made it to the fourth edition. It changed our lives for the better. It's the best forty bucks I've ever spent.

The big type, the philosophical filler pages, and the fact that he's basically saying "call around for hours, and see if anyone has anything they are desperate to get rid of, then turn around and sell it at a profit" fulfilled my expectation that this book would be virtually worthless to anyone trying to find out exactly HOW to make money in this business.

This book was biased towards antiques, which I know absolutely nothing about, and would certainly lose my shirt attempting to sell. I had hoped instead for some SPECIFIC examples of where to go and find items to sell. Instead, this book is mostly vague "you can do this" rah rah stuff. Utterly worthless to me, especially at the obscenely high price for a paperback with big type.

I would like to recomend this book that helped immensely to our study group to approve the third exam on the CPIM certification from APICS, also the presentations in flash that are in its website, is an excellent aid for a better comprenhension of the topics and very helpfull when explaining to groups.

This book is too complicated and not well-written. Reading this book feels like reading a science or an engineering book more than a management book. It's focusing on mathematical formulas in a very high level of detail, which the reader finds uselss. I found myself skipping a lot of pages; the pages I skipped are definitly more than ones I read. The only reason I bought this book is because it's a CPIM required source. You are probably checking this book out for the same reason. I hope by the time you read my review, CPIM will decide to eliminate this book from its list of required sources.

This book is difficult to classify other than it ties together a number of related, but different, disciplines. It is also one of the most interesting books on ERP, CRM and SCM I have ever read because of the eclectic array of topics and fascinating points of view.

Chapters I liked based on professional interest are: Auditing the Implementation, Operation and Maintenance of ERP Software, The Ongoing Change in the Practice of Auditing Information Technology, Auditing Supply Chain Solutions and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, Case Studies in Auditing a Company's Financial Statements and Other Reports, Auditing the Security/Protection Methodology and Providing Improvements. These are solidly written and thoroughly cover all aspects of the topics. This is no surprise if you are familiar with Mr. Chorafas' work, which is heavily slanted towards financial management.

I also liked "The Next Frontier in Technology and in Supply Chain Management", which is one of the more visionary chapters in the book. It also has one of the longest titles I have ever seen (I truncated the complete title name). Unfortunately, like the title, well crafted sentences are not a hallmark of Mr. Chorafas' writing. Despite that, the information he provides between the covers of this book is thought-provoking and excellent fodder for long-range strategic planning.

If you are an architect, strategic planner of CIO of a company that employs or plans to employ any two or the three foundation systems discussed in this book (ERP, CRM or SCM) this book is essential reading. It is also an excellent resource for consultants who specialize in any of the three system types.

Chorafas book is tedious to read. The titles are excellent, but the majority of the time I found the content under the title poorly researched, off the subject or focused only on one insignificant point instead of the subject title.