Reorganizing the Factory: Competing Through Cellular Manufacturing

By Urban Wemmerlov and Nancy Hyer

Book Overview

Winner of the 2003 Shingo Prize!

Reorganizing work processes into cells has helped many organizations streamline operations, shorten lead times, increase quality, and lower costs. Cellular manufacturing is a powerful concept that is simple to understand; however, its ultimate success depends on deciding where cells fit into your organization, and then applying the know-how to design, implement and operate them.

Reorganizing the Factory presents a thoroughly researched and comprehensive "life cycle" approach to competing through cellular work organizations. It takes you from the basic cell concept and its benefits through the process of justifying, designing, implementing, operating, and improving this new type of work organization in offices and on the factory floor.

The book discusses many important technical dimensions, such as factory analysis, cell design, planning and control systems, and principles for lead time and inventory reduction. However, unique to the literature, it also covers in depth the numerous managerial issues that accompany organizing work into cells. In most implementations, performance measurement, compensation, education and training, employee involvement, and change management are critically important. These issues are often overlooked in the planning process, yet they can occupy more of the implementation time than do the technical aspects of cells.

Includes:

Why do cells improve lead time, quality, and cost? Planning for cell implementation Justifying the move to cells, strategically and economically Designing efficient manufacturing and office cells Selecting and training cell employees Compensation system for cell employees Performance and cost measurement Planning and control of materials and capacity Managing the change to cells Problems in designing, implementing, and operating cells Improving and adapting existing cells Structured frameworks and checklists to help analysis and decision-making Numerous examples of cells in various industries

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1563272288
• ISBN13: 9781563272288
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Length: 788 Pages
• Weight: 3.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 7.1" x 10.4"

Customer Reviews

The definitive book on cellular manufacturing

This book is THE reference book on cellular manufacturing. The authors have clearly distilled the knowledge gained from over 20 years of cellular manufacturing research. An excellent book and the most complete reference on the subject.

Everything about CM and easy-to-understand.

I personally had the chance to take Urban's Cellular Manufacturing class and discuss the entire book with him. Urban and Nancy did an excellent job explaining what cellular manufacturing is, what it does, how it improves the competetiveness of an organization with easy language. The best thing about this book is that almost everything mentioned in the book can be implemented and you will learn how. There is NO hard-to-understand formulas, too technical information, or any junk info you will never use. It also includes some real case studies from some European, African, and North American companies. You will find some survey results regarding the percent improvements these companies achieved as a result of cellular manufacturing. Besides the technical info covered in the book, you will also find some people-related issues and how to deal with them. For example, how to choose the cell employees, how to build a cell team, etc. In addition, the authors talk about some computer software, MPX, that can easily analyze a cell's performance, in terms of utilization levels of the machines/employees, lead times of the products, etc. If you are in the process of implementing cellular manufacturing or if you have cells but also have problems, you will definetely need to look at this book. A great book and a must-read.