(with history, anecdotes and implementation tips)

This book by Peter Béndek presents a strong case against the current practice of business operations improvement, based on numerous studies from the business world as well as insights from the most prestigious authors of the last fifty years. The author contests the applicability and indeed the relevance of the Toyota Production System and its spin-offs to the Western context, claiming that a revised approach is much better suited to taking our specific cultural conditions into account, while also combining increased transparency, speed, and sustainability of change with a robust value-creating capability. Dr. Béndek argues that this approach can have a far-reaching impact on corporate cultures by offering an all-encompassing learning system, one that provides a more coherent and actionable continuous improvement strategy than conventional approaches. The book offers an important guide to rethinking operations management, both in academia and business practice.

The complexity of today’s large organisations, businesses, and social institutions defeats management approaches based on monolithic thinking. Most industry and service organisations look at their performance either from a single perspective – productivity, quality, safety, etc. – or from different but separate perspectives that reside in organisational silos. Quality is treated separately from safety, which, again, is treated separately from productivity, and so on. While siloed thinking may be convenient in the short term, it fails to recognise that any specific perspective reveals only a part of what goes on. Yet it is essential to have a unified view of how an organisation functions effectively to manage changes and to ensure the organisation excels in what it does. Synesis represents the mutually dependent set of priorities, perspectives, and practices that an organisation needs to carry out its activities as intended. It shows how to overcome the fragmentation in foci, scope, and time that characterises the dominant change management paradigms. This book is consequently not about productivity or quality or safety or reliability but about all of these together. It is about why it is necessary to think of them as a whole. And it is about how this can be done in practice.

Energy managers need to learn new and diverse ways to approach energy management in their company's assets as technology continues to evolve. Built into one cohesive and fundamental resource, Introduction to Energy Essentials: Insight into Nuclear, Renewable, and Non-Renewable Energies delivers an informative tool to understand the main steps for introducing and maintaining an energy management system (EnMS). Starting with a high-level introduction, the reference then takes a structured approach and dives into different sources of energy along with their contribution to energy efficiency, focusing on nuclear power, renewable and non-renewable energies. Multiple options are further discussed including economic considerations and cost comparisons per energy source, energy storage technology, and how to introduce an energy management system into your company. More advanced topics include nuclear reactor power plant systems and their thermal hydraulic analysis as well as cyber resiliency for future electric power and well plant control systems. Authored by experts, Introduction to Energy Essentials: Insight into Nuclear, Renewable, and Non-Renewable Energies gives today's energy managers and engineers a solid starting point to meeting the energy demands of today and in the future. - Understand key concepts, techniques, and tools surrounding energy management - Learn how to include smarter energy efficiency in your daily management decisions - Gain the fundamental technical skills and knowledge on renewable and non-renewable energy systems

This ambitious book provides a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative assessment of Jamaica’s ties to the International Monetary Fund, focusing on Jamaica’s historical relationship with the IMF and reflecting on the domestic and international discourse surrounding the evolution of this relationship. Notably, this volume presents a critical analysis of Jamaica’s first engagement with and departure from the IMF and interrogates the political economy of the period. Jamaica’s economic experiences are assessed in the context of major global events, including the food price crises of 2007 and the global economic crises of 2008 and 2009. This book also looks at policy implications, and its well-researched analysis will be of great value to practitioners and policymakers as well as academics.

This book utilizes historical evidence to describe the development of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The development of TPS typifies the transformation of production control in interchangeable industries in the twentieth century. Much of the extensive literature available on TPS has been geared toward describing TPS from a number of different perspectives. Many researchers consider TPS distinct from American mass-production systems. Although TPS (and, more generally, the production control systems in the Japanese assembly industry) has differentiated itself from similar US production systems, the evolution of TPS is largely attributable to attempts to learn from, imitate, and modify pre-World War II US production methods. Through these efforts, TPS has achieved levels of efficiency in Japan comparable to those of US production systems. Additionally, a reliance on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in relation to production control has facilitated the development of TPS. The literature on TPS, however, has largely ignored the vital relationship between ICT and production control due to an inordinate focus on “Kanban.” Kanban translates to “signboard” in Japanese but is used to refer to an organic linkage between work in preceding and subsequent production processes. This book sheds light on the development of a fully digitalized Bill of Materials (BOM) at Toyota, behind its Kanban and production control.

Toyota Methods and Operating Models presents a case study of a small, traditional Italian manufacturer in the Toyota Industries Corporation Group, which began an important process of transformation until it became a successful, modern and advanced international business: Toyota Material Handling. Toyota management made internal changes and developed the commercial networks, successfully applying the Toyota Production System (TPS, or Lean Production) as well as the values of the Toyota Way. Author Stefano Cortiglioni led the transformation project, which took four years. Toyota Methods and Operating Models presents the continuing success story. The authors analyze the Toyota methods and operating models that can be directly applied to your business in order to reach excellence in operations and industry 4.0. It provides tangible advice on how to grow a business and achieve commercial success, with superior processes and logistics networks, as well as the development of an advanced and highly successful supply chain.