Supply and Operations Management

This book takes readers inside Chinese organizations and shows how factories are, built, labor is managed, goods are sourced, quality is controlled, and logistics are handled. Leading business schools routinely offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in operations and supply chain management. Yet 200,000 U.S. jobs in supply chain management go unfilled each year owing to lack of talent. The talent that U.S. companies need, and that this book provides, is understanding how to make and buy products from China. How important is China to U.S. operations? In 2018, U.S. imports from China reached $600 billion. Half of these, imports were bought by U.S. manufacturers. A dependency on Chinese goods is even greater when looking at U.S. supply chains. Sixty cents of every dollar that U.S. consumers spend on goods made in China go to U.S. workers and companies. Successful operations and supply chain managers understand manufacturing in China. This book takes readers inside Chinese organizations and shows how factories are, built, labor is managed, goods are sourced, quality is controlled, and logistics are handled. Through this immersion experience, readers are able to see the opportunities and pitfalls in manufacturing in China.

The book is based on a new quality model and explains why a positive culture is a prerequisite to sustainable quality improvement. Today, the concept of using quality as a competitive advantage has been diminished or even lost completely. It is not that there is a lack of quality improvement models, as there are many available. While each has had success, no one model that taken hold as the model. Why do improvement efforts seem to fizzle out? Why are they not sustainable? Something has been missing from the strategy, planning, and implementation of these quality efforts. That missing ingredient has been culture. This book provides the strategy, tools, and methods needed for sustainable quality. The book is based on a new quality model and explains why a positive culture is a prerequisite to sustainable quality improvement. Excellence is achieved through people, and it is this people-centric approach that should be the basis for success. By building a foundation based on inclusion, positive culture, and strong leadership, great achievements are possible. This inside-out approach creates a strong internal community, which can be the catalyst for embracing change and sustainable improvement.

The Cost is for those in the cost engineering field and everyone who is in a manufacturing business: engineers, buyers, sales reps, accountants, operations folks, and business consultants. The Cost is a story of a cost engineering consultant named Doug Benson who does his best to help companies understand and improve cost. When Doug arrives at Electronica, the company is on a verge of bankruptcy and hardly even knows why. He must use all his cost engineering knowledge and leadership skills amidst some considerable corporate drama all the while fighting his own personal demons in order to give Electronica a chance. The type of situations that he finds himself in are happening all over the world every day and the results are often dramatic with people losing jobs, stakeholders losing millions of dollars, and communities losing hope. The Cost is not only for those in the cost engineering field. This book is for everyone in a manufacturing business. It is for engineers, buyers, sales reps, accountants, operations folks, and business consultants. This book is also for anyone that is leading a business and has the power to employ cost engineering to make their company successful.