Most books on manufacturing focus on production. This book is different; it describes techniques for excelling in engineering design, marketing strategies, and customer service inside a manufacturing company. Managing a successful manufacturing company in today's competitive global economy requires teamwork between the above disciplines. It is no longer enough just to be efficient on the production floor.
Manufacturing companies employ hundreds and in many cases thousands of people with different skill sets, ideas, and values.
Strategy + Teamwork = Great Products: Management Techniques for Manufacturing Companies explains how to mold employees from various walks of life into a cohesive and successful manufacturing team.
It describes the best methods and programs to do that and includes examples that illustrate how to do so.
After reading this book, you will understand how to avoid common pitfalls and steer clear of useless fads that can be destructive to your organization. The book details powerful methods for motivating people, reducing costs, and improving strategic decision making. It also identifies the role of human resources in providing the training required to help manufacturing management in their tasks.
Managing a manufacturing company is about running a business rather than just producing parts and assembling them. That is why this book starts at the top--outlining the duties of the Board of Directors and going on to describe the strategic roles and responsibilities of marketing, engineering, manufacturing engineering, and human resources.
Describing how to best organize your manufacturing company, this book not only outlines management theories relevant to a successful organization, it also gets down to the nitty-gritty implementation of processes and practices with potential application across a wide range of manufacturing organizations.
Frederick Parker was born in Hungary and escaped communist rule in 1949 when he immigrated to Australia. He received his degree in industrial engineering at the University of New South Wales. After moving to America, he specialized in manufacturing management and turnaround situations for several hi-tech companies, including corporate strategies for international companies.
Parker was general manager of a large international telecommunication company in Silicon Valley, in charge of 1,200 employees, shipping $500 million of hi-tech equipment from a 300,000-square-foot factory. He achieved 55 percent gross margins. When he was promoted to corporate vice president of operations, he was asked to research and formulate the manufacturing strategy for this international corporation. At that time, the company had factories all over the world. In that strategic role, Parker studied the latest trends in world-class manufacturing before implementing his plans for the corporation.
Parker also built and managed factories in Mexico and later as vice president of operations took part of taking a company public. The year after that public offering, the company's stock was the largest percentage gainer on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Before retiring and writing this book, Parker consulted for several companies that relied on his expertise of new product introduction and cost reduction.
Strategy +Teamwork is based on his 40 years of experience in manufacturing management and his strong desire to pass on the wisdom he gained in confronting difficult problems in the competitive global environment. Parker is consulting part time and lives in San Diego with his wife and has two children and three grandchildren.
He also wrote a book on bridge, Win at Duplicate Bridge, and he enjoys playing bridge, golf, chess, and writing articles.
