Job Shop Leaders: Small Wins From a Factory Life

"If high-volume production is heavy metal, make to order is jazz."

This book is about job shops. Inside is a combination of stories and practical tips from my experience. It’s not theory. This is how I lost money, made money, kept my job or got promoted. These are all the things I dug through the literature trying to find answers to.

Job shops can be many different types of businesses. Factories, distributors, and government offices could all be considered job shops. Job shops are all those places where the work you do, and the volume of work varies from day to day, even custom design businesses where every piece is unique.

There were seven challenges I struggled with that I couldn’t find adequate answers to. We talk about it here by addressing: controlling lead times, eliminating knack points, Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), solving dynamic capacity, getting to full kit, order unevenness (Mura), and Minimum Viable Process (MVP).

If you work in high volume mass production this probably isn't written for you. If you've never lost a night's sleep trying to understand how your business works, put this down. If you like big words and highly technical descriptions I’m not your guy.

This book is for the searchers.

I’m looking forward to this. Come on inside.


QUESTION AND ANSWER WITH THE AUTHOR:

Q: Where did the idea for this book come from?

A: Hindsight is such a powerful tool. Sometimes it's good to hit rewind and see how something happened. I'm also afraid of forgetting. So this book serves as a notebook of past projects, observations, and struggles. Hopefully, in some small way, it is also recognition of the people with whom I worked. The factory is much maligned. There's no shortage of stories about people injured in them, or people seeking to escape them. I'd like to show that they are worthy of our efforts and our time. I believe we take joy in work, but the work must be challenging. And I've found that make to order factories and businesses fit the bill; combining repetitive production methods with a creativity we associate with the arts. Just because it's worthwhile does not mean factory work is easy. Our days were often long and dirty. Team members were not always seen as artisans but rather as strong backs or willing minds. This bit of writing is my thank you to them.

Q: What were the major influences of this work?

A: Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, and I am no different. I owe a great debt to Eli Goldratt for his logical thinking process and the Theory of Constraints (TOC); (a more rigorous approach to system thinking than I have witnessed since). As well as Bill Dettmer’s “The Logical Thinking Process”, Mark Woeppel’s “Visual Project Management” and many others - the practitioners who showed me the way forward. I mention all of them in the notes section at the end.