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How do companies in high labor cost countries manage to remain competitive? In western manufacturing, the more manual a process, the more severe the competitive handicap of high wages. Full automation would make labor costs irrelevant but remain impractical in most industries. Most successful manufacturing processes in advanced economies are neither fully manual nor fully automatic -- they involve interactions between small numbers of highly skilled people and machines that account for the bulk of the manufacturing costs and thereby remain competitive. In Working with Machines: The Nuts and Bolts of Lean Operations With Jidoka, author Michel Baudin explains how performance differences that can be observed from one factory to the next are due to the way people use the machines -- from the human interfaces of individual machines to the linking of machines into cells, the management of monuments and common services, automation, maintenance, and production control.

Product Description: The authors use their decades of experience and draw upon real-world examples to demonstrate that the application of their techniques provides a basis for equipment management, uptime maximization, and reduced maintenance costs. The text explores reliability assessment techniques such as Failure Mode, Effect Analysis, and Fault Tree Analysis of commonly encountered rotating machinery...read more

Product Description: For Ford, the machine was not only the symbol of man's mastery of his environment, but also the means whereby he could release his intellectual and spiritual powers. Ford himself in his prime, contrary to popular stereotype, was far less interested in amassing wealth or in mass producing than in providing a service...read more

This study of the advent of computers in the workplace examines the impact of automation on workers in several fields, concluding that business must integrate their employees with new technologies if automation is to succeed

Product Description: A noted Harvard social scientist documents the pitfalls and promises of computerized technology in business life.

Product Description: Human skill and judgment are needed now more than ever to effectively run today's complex computerized production systems. In this thought-provoking study of work, worker, and machine in the postindustrial age, Hirschhorn points out that factories will become places of learning where the worker must be able to diagnose and solve an array of problems generated by error-prone machine systems...read more