Books about Shop floor from Amazon.com

The philosophy of kaizen, which simply means continuous improvement, needs to adopted by any organization seeking to implement lean improvements that go beyond cost cutting. Kaizen events are opportunities to make focused changes in the workplace. Kaizen for the Shopfloor takes readers through the critical steps for conducting a very effective kaizen event: one that is well planned, well implemented, and well documented. As the newest addition to the Shingo Prize Winning Shopfloor Series, Kaizen for the Shopfloordistills the complexities of jumpstarting lean processes into an easily accessible format for those frontline employees who make lean possible.

About the Shopfloor Series: Put proven improvement tools in the hands of your entire workforce!

Progressive shopfloor improvement techniques are imperative for manufacturers who want to stay competitive and to achieve world class excellence. And it's the comprehensive education of all shopfloor workers that ensures full participation and success when implementing new programs. The Shopfloor Series books make practical information accessible to everyone by presenting major concepts and tools in simple, clear language and at a reading level that has been adjusted for operators by skilled instructional designers. One main idea is presented every two to four pages so that the book can be picked up and put down easily. Each chapter begins with an overview and ends with a summary section. Helpful illustrations are used throughout.

Other topics in the Shopfloor Series: Kanban, 5S, Quick Changeover, Mistake-Proofing, Just-in-Time, TPM, Cellular Manufacturing.
Price: $22.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this first comprehensive departure from the time-and-motion dictums of Frederick Taylor's Shop Management that have influenced management practices for most of this century, Kiyoshi Suzaki offers a framework for successfully conducting business at its most crucial point-the shop floor. Drawing on the principles of holistic management, where organizational boundaries are smashed and co-destiny is created, Suzaki demonstrates how modern shop floor management techniques -- focusing maximum energy on the front line -- can lead to dramatic improvements in productivity and valueadded-to-services.

The role of management today, Suzaki argues, is to eliminate its own responsibilities by thinking of the organization from the genba, or shop floor, point of view. In this challenge, Suzaki claims, organizations need to collect the wisdom of people by practicing "Glass Wall Management," where organizations become transparent, enabling employees to contribute maximum creativity as opposed to blocking their potential with what he calls "Brick Wall Management." Further, to empower individuals to selfmanage their work and satisfy their customers, Suzaki asserts that they all should learn to manage their own "mini-company," where everybody is considered president of his or her area of responsibility.

Front-line supervisors, Suzaki shows, must develop a mission and goals and share them both up and downstream. He cites examples of the "shop floor point of view" -- McDonald's Corporation's legal staff learning how to sell hamburgers and fix milkshake machines; Honda's human resource staff training on the assembly line -- that narrow the gap between top management and the shop floor. By upgrading people's skills, focusing on empowerment, and streamlining processes, Suzaki illustrates that an organization will realize concrete improvements in quality, cost, delivery, safety, morale, and ultimately, its competitive position.

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Price: $9.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Lord Otori, Takeo, and Takeo's new teacher Kenji set off to meet Kaede, a fifteen-year-old girl chosen as the future Lady Otori by a group of political collaborators Takeo is still trying to come to terms with knowing that, through the father he never knew, he is one of the Tribe—a group of mysterious, ninja-like assassins who have allegiance to no one. When Takeo and Kaede first meet, they are drawn to each other, and without speaking a word, fall in love. But events are doomed to pull them apart, and soon they are each thrust into a battle for their lives..
Price: $0.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Seventeen-year-old Tomasu lives in a remote mountain village, some of whose residents—including his mother—are members of the Hidden, a clandestine, peaceful religious sect. He has never met his father. One day, while Tomasu is out collecting mushrooms, a band of Tohan warriors descends upon and massacres the village. Tomasu confronts the warriors, but is rescued by the mysterious Lord Otori, who changes the boy's name to Takeo, and wants to adopt him. As Takeo learns to read, and to fight with sword and pole, on and off horseback, he does not realize that he is the center of a bloody intrigue . . . until it is almost too late.

Winner of the Alex Award

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A School Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Readers.
Price: $0.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Autonomous maintenance is an especially important pillar of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) because it enlists the intelligence and skills of the people who are most familiar with factory machines-- equipment operators. Operators learn the maintenance skills they need to know through a seven-step autonomous maintenance program. Most companies in the West stop after implementing the first few steps and never realize the full benefits of autonomous maintenance. This book contains comprehensive coverage of all seven steps--not just the first three or four.

It includes:

• An overview of autonomous maintenance features and checklists for step audits to certify team achievement at each AM step.
• TPM basics such as the six big losses, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), causes of losses, and six major TPM activities.
• An implementation plan for TPM and five countermeasures for achieving zero breakdowns.
• Useful guidelines and case studies in applying AM to manual work such as assembly, inspection, and material handling.
• Integrates examples from Toyota, Asai Glass, Bridgestone, Hitachi, and other top companies.

By treating machines as partners and taking responsibility for them, you get machines that you can rely on and help maintain an energized and responsive workplace. For companies that are serious about taking autonomous maintenance beyond mere cleaning programs, this is an essential sourcebook and implementation support.

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Price: $40.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book looks at the flip side of globalization: How does a company from the Global South behave differently when it also produces in the Global North? A Mexican tortilla company, "Tortimundo," has two production facilities within a hundred miles of each other, but on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The workers at the two factories produce the same product with the same technology, but have significantly different work realities. This "global factory" gives Carolina Bank Muñoz an ideal opportunity to reveal how management regimes and company policy on each side of the border apply different strategies to exploit their respective workforces' vulnerabilities.

The author's in-depth ethnographic fieldwork shows that the U.S. factory is characterized by an "immigration regime" and the Mexican factory by a "gender regime." In the California factory, managers use state policy and laws related to immigration status to pit documented and undocumented workers against each other. Undocumented workers are subject to harsher punishment, night-shift work, and lower pay. In the Baja California factory, managers sexually harass women--who make up most of the workforce--and create divisions between light- and dark-skinned women, forcing them to compete for managerial attention, which they understand equates with job security.

In describing and analyzing the differences in working conditions between the two plants, Bank Muñoz provides important new insights into how, in a globalized economy, managerial strategies for labor control are determined by the interaction of state policies and labor market conditions with race, gender, and class at the point of production..
Price: $15.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Competitiveness in the New Economy demands streamlined operations and a total organizational effort to more quickly improve bottom-line performance from shop floor to boardroom The Lean Enterprise Memory JoggerTM provides practical tools and methods: - Mapping the Value Stream - Visual Management - Error Proofing - Quick Changeover - Standard Operations - One-Piece Flow - The Kanban System - Total Productive Maintenance - Lean Metrics - Reduce waste across the board - Shorten cycle times - Eliminate non-value-added activities - Improve customer satisfaction - Align business performance projects more closely with core objectives for maximum shareholder value. And do it all at the lowest cost of operations!.
Price: $8.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As distinguished from autonomous maintenance, where the main goal is to restore basic conditions of cleanliness, lubrication, and proper fastening to prevent accelerated deterioration, FEI looks at specific losses or design weaknesses that everyone previously thought they just had to live with. Once your TPM operator teams are progressing with their daily autonomous maintenance activities, you will want to take the next advanced step in TPM training with this book.

Key Features:

• a simple and powerful introduction to P-M Analysis
• hints for unraveling breakdown analysis
• numerous ideas for simplifying and shortening setups
• ideas for eliminating minor stoppages and speed losses
• basic concepts of building quality into processing
• real-life examples from a leading Japanese tool company

Educate and empower all your workers to support your TPM improvement activities with Productivity's Shopfloor Series. Designed for on-the-floor study groups, the TPM Shopfloor curriculum will graduate operator teams from learning TPM basics to studying advanced improvement techniques..
Price: $22.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Making Lean Work: “In-the-Trenches” Help from a World-Class Expert

Lean manufacturing can improve productivity and quality, shorten lead times, reduce costs, and improve competitiveness. However, succeeding with lean is not easy. Chris A. Ortiz, one of the country’s most respected lean implementers, shows you exactly how to overcome obstacles, drive value from lean, and sustain success for the long term.

Ortiz draws on his experience leading many successful lean transitions and more than 150 kaizen events. He shows you how to prepare for a lean shop floor environment, implement best practice procedures and standards, build executive support, lead kaizen within the factory, and deal with the ups and downs you will inevitably encounter.

Forget theory: This is a step-by-step, what-to-do guide for professionals in the trenches—plant and engineering managers, lean managers and directors, Six Sigma practitioners, and working engineers.

Topics covered include

• Seven reasons lean can fail—and how to overcome them
• Establishing successful kaizen programs: champions, events, teams, goals, tracking, and scheduling
• Avoiding early stumbling blocks in data collection, waste removal, and process design
• Getting your operators and supervisors to “buy into” lean
• Training managers, engineers, and new employees
• Promoting flexibility and cross-training
• Using lean to drive growth, not just save money
• Lean leadership made simple: twelve practical techniques, five simple rules—and ten things not to do
• Sample audit, tracking, and time study forms

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Price: $25.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

High-Tech Betrayal is the first comprehensive study of life and work in an American high-tech factory Victor Devinatz uses both research and personal experience as a shop floor organizer to dispel the popular belief that high-tech industries offer positive employment alternatives for those seeking to escape jobs in the "declining" industries. While many believe that the "light manufacturing" work of high-tech industries is preferable to "heavy" industrial work, Devinatz attacks these misconceptions by exposing some of the myths that such work offers more promotional opportunities, requires higher skill levels, and is better paying. Devinatz demonstrates that U.S. high-tech factories of the late twentieth century are much like the industrial sweatshops of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where poorly paid workers toiled in the shadows of brutal foremen without the benefits of union protection. Devinatz argues that, instead of creating exciting work environments of the future, high-tech firms are marching boldly into the past..
Price: $18.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]