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Andersen, Björn;
Business Process Improvement Toolbox, ASQ Quality
Press, 1999.
Many books refer to various charting techniques and tools for performance improvement. This book gives you the details on what they are, how they work, and
how you can best use them within your organization.
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Goldratt, Eliyahu and Jeff Cox;
The Goal, North River Press, 1992.
The Theory of Constraints explained using a quick
read story telling approach. Streamline operations
by focusing on end-to-end throughput, not individual
efficiency, and by identifying bottlenecks and
providing alternatives for their elimination.
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Imai, Masaaki;
Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to
Management,
McGraw-Hill,
1997.
A good book for listing out the things you should be
thinking about as you begin to address continuous
performance improvement within your organization.
The book has a manufacturing focus, but the way the
information is presented, these Lean Management
techniques are readily transferable to the services
industry.
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Juran, Joseph;
Juran’s Quality Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Unlike many books this size, its value is far more
than a door stop. If you are going to buy more than
one book on quality, this is the book for you. For
those of you that believe a book on quality is only
of interest to people with that in their title, this
is the book for you. And for those of you that think
there is only one true quality dogma, this is the
book for you. An excellent and balanced treatment of
the subject that leaves you with the understanding
that "quality" really suffers from a poor marketing
image. There is more depth behind the quality
movement than many realize.
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Rother, Mike and John Shook;
Learning to See, The Lean Enterprise
Institute, 1998.
A simple straight-forward method of mapping out the
value stream (or work flow) of an organization. The
book has a heavy manufacturing focus, but the
approach produces easy to draw and easy to
understand maps of value added work flowing through
the organization. The fact that they are easy to
draw differentiates this approach from others. They
make it easy to see areas for performance
improvement.
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Schwaber, Ken and Mike Beedle;
Agile Software Development with Scrum,
Prentice Hall, 2002.
The comment heard most frequently about applying
manufacturing productivity improvement techniques to
services businesses, is that they don't apply to
ad-hoc environments. They only work in assembly line
environments, not in job shops where every task is
different. This book applies Lean Management
techniques to software development. If they work in
the software world, they will work anywhere.
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Sterman, John D.,
Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and
Modeling for a Complex World, McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Organizations are non-linear complex systems.
Building high performance organizations that are
both effective and efficient requires system
thinking - and expanding how we think about the
complex interactions of any value stream. This book
provides a perspective to organizational modeling
that will eventually change how we all manage our
businesses.
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Treacy, Michael and Fred Wiersema;
The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow your Focus,
Dominate Your Market, Perseus Publishing, 1997.
Focus is easy to say, hard to do. It is difficult to
turn away from what appear to be opportunities
behind every door. As the title says, this book
describes a method for evaluating multiple customer
market strategies with the goal of establishing
focused market differentiation.
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Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos;
The Machine that
Changed the World, Rawson Associates, 1990.
This book documents a revolution impacting business
performance that started over 50 years ago. Since
the Lean Management revolution started in
manufacturing, not many people in the services
business have heard about it yet, but the techniques
apply. Those in a services industry that have heard
about it, and are acting on it, are building a
competitive advantage that laggards will find
difficult to overtake. Read this book, join the
revolution, and don't be left behind.
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Womack, James P. and Daniel T. Jones;
Lean Thinking, Simon &
Schuster, 1996.
Lean is the name used within the USA for the group
of management techniques described in the book "The
Machine the Changed the World." As many have pointed
out, this book is the bible on Lean performance
improvement techniques. Enough said.
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