Introduction

Many advances have been made in manufacturing management in the last thirty or forty years. These improvements originated in many different areas, and included such concepts as Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II), Statistical Process Control (SPC), Group Technology (GT), the Just-In-Time Approach (JIT), the Theory of Constraints (TOC), and Total Quality Management (TQM). These advances usually built on earlier concepts, utilizing their strengths while introducing new ideas to meet unsolved challenges. This work follows that pattern. The first two chapters discuss the present status of manufacturing management and the challenges that exist. The chapters which follow describe an approach that has overcome many of these challenges in a broad range of manufacturing settings.