In The Solutions Factory, Arun Maira digs deep into his experiences as a consultant and presents twenty human-led business stories that cover all kinds of problem-solving techniques told through carefully picked personal experiences and anecdotes. By distilling the essence of the work that consultants do, he offers a management handbook that is unique to Indian business practices. From cultural understanding to communication skills, this book illustrates the applicability of simple tips for a diverse range of business roles and levels. Maira's down-to-earth and insightful approach, keenly oriented towards respectful and ethical business practices, illustrates his signature mix of idealism and pragmatism-be it is about managing an unexpected crisis or about learning more about another company's culture. In this age of financial uncertainty due to the pandemic, a book like this is as essential for small-business owners as it is for the heads of major corporations. Maira's focus on excellence through ethics, success through learning, and valuation through value brings to the fore his people-centric and back-to-basics approach-an approach that every modern corporation will need in order to prepare for the future ahead of us.

Tarina Tarantino's love affair with fashion jewelry and accessories began when she was just a little girl. Tarina now owns and operates her famous global jewelry, accessories, and cosmetics brand, TARINA TARANTINO, out of her international headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, The Sparkle Factory. In her first book, Tarina invites you into her world to learn how to make and wear beautiful and inspirational fashion jewelry. Fashionistas, aspiring jewelry designers, and DIY lovers will learn how to make 20 of Tarina's most essential pieces including statement earrings, cocktail rings, hair jewelry, stretch cuff bracelets, embellished spectacles, and more. Fans of Tarina will also learn about her brand history, getting inspired, creating themes and stories, sourcing materials, essential tools and techniques, how to wear and style your jewelry wardrobe, and more. The text is complemented by tips and hundreds of full-color photos throughout.

“He who stops getting better has stopped being good. ” Hans Schneider, General Manager of the Siemens Amberg Electronics Factory, Industrial Excellence Award overall winner 2007 There is a general perception that inflexible labor markets and high labor costs are contributing to a massive displacement of manufacturing jobs and investment from Western Europe to Eastern Europe and Asia. The debate in Western Europe is highly charged, but sometimes ill-informed. It is true that some low-skilled jobs are moving into low labor cost countries. On the other hand, many more highly skilled jobs are actually being created in the highly developed countries. The total impact on Western economies is much more complicated, and there is some evidence of important benefits. In this book, we showcase examples of excellent industrial management that has managed to create substantial job growth in manufacturing. This book is based on 14 years’ observation of the Industrial Excellence Award (IEA) in Germany and France, the first ten years of which we summarized in our previous book, Industrial Excellence (Springer 2003), and on an additional five years of obser- tion between 2002 and 2007. We have seen that management’s first and noble responsibility to society is to achieve competitiveness. Competitive organizations create growth and jobs, even in Western Europe. Competitiveness requires clearly articulated strategic positioning, together with excellent execution, and mobili- tion of all employees to apply their abilities and to pull in one direction.

Expanding on the editors' award-winning article "Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing," this book presents a challenging new paradigm for the marketing discipline. This new paradigm is service-oriented, customer-oriented, relationship-focused, and knowledge-based, and places marketing, once viewed as a support function, central to overall business strategy. Service-dominant logic defines service as the application of competencies for the benefit of another entity and sees mutual service provision, rather than the exchange of goods, as the proper subject of marketing. It moves the orientation of marketing from a "market to" philosophy where customers are promoted to, targeted, and captured, to a "market with" philosophy where the customer and supply chain partners are collaborators in the entire marketing process. The editors elaborate on this model through an historical analysis, clarification, and extension of service-dominant logic, and distinguished marketing thinkers then provide further insight and commentary. The result is a more comprehensive and inclusive marketing theory that will challenge both current thinking and marketing practice.

Our economy and future way of life depend on how well American manufacturing managers adapt to the dynamic, globally competitive landscape and evolve their firms to keep pace. A major challenge is how to structure the firms environment so that it attains the speed and low cost of high-volume flow lines while retaining the flexibility and customization potential of a low-volume job shop. The books three parts are organized according to three categories of skills required by managers and engineers: basics, intuition, and synthesis. Part I reviews traditional operations management techniques and identifies the necessary components of the science of manufacturing. Part II presents the core concepts of the book, beginning with the structure of the science of manufacturing and a discussion of the systems approach to problem solving. Other topics include behavioral tendencies of manufacturing plants, push and pull production systems, the human element in operations management, and the relationship between quality and operations. Chapter conclusions include main points and observations framed as manufacturing laws. In Part III, the lessons of Part I and the laws of Part II are applied to address specific manufacturing management issues in detail. The authors compare and contrast common problems, including shop floor control, long-range aggregate planning, workforce planning and capacity management. A main focus in Part III is to help readers visualize how general concepts in Part II can be applied to specific problems. Written for both engineering and management students, the authors demonstrate the effectiveness of a rule-based and data driven approach to operations planning and control. They advance an organized framework from which to evaluate management practices and develop useful intuition about manufacturing systems.

The two-volume set IFIP AICT 566 and 567 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International IFIP WG 5.7 Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems, APMS 2019, held in Austin, TX, USA. The 161 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 184 submissions. They discuss globally pressing issues in smart manufacturing, operations management, supply chain management, and Industry 4.0. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: lean production; production management in food supply chains; sustainability and reconfigurability of manufacturing systems; product and asset life cycle management in smart factories of industry 4.0; variety and complexity management in the era of industry 4.0; participatory methods for supporting the career choices in industrial engineering and management education; blockchain in supply chain management; designing and delivering smart services in the digital age; operations management in engineer-to-order manufacturing; the operator 4.0 and the Internet of Things, services and people; intelligent diagnostics and maintenance solutions for smart manufacturing; smart supply networks; production management theory and methodology; data-driven production management; industry 4.0 implementations; smart factory and IIOT; cyber-physical systems; knowledge management in design and manufacturing; collaborative product development; ICT for collaborative manufacturing; collaborative technoloy; applications of machine learning in production management; and collaborative technology.