Build-to-Order & Mass Customization; The Ultimate Supply Chain Management and Lean Manufacturing Strategy for Low-Cost On-Demand Production without Forecasts or Inventory

This thorough 512 page book shows how to: Build any product, standard or mass-customized, on-demand without forecasts or inventory; Simplify supply chains to resupply spontaneously, rather than trying to manage complex supply chains that order and wait for parts. Achieve substantial cost advantages from eliminating inventory and many overhead costs. Revolutionize company business models with evolutionary self-supporting steps for dramatic growth of revenue and profits.

This book will be extremely valuable for manufacturers that have any of these challenges:

Customization. Craft customizing is slow, expensive, and hard to maintain quality. Customizing by mass production is inefficient and compromises the other production.

Product Variety. Mass producers who try to build-to-forecast a wide variety of products will always wrestle with the classic dilemma: too many different products to sell from inventory, but trying to build them to order in a batch-and-queue environment is too slow and costly in addition to raising resource demands and lowering equipment capacity.

Unreliable Forecasts. Forecast accuracy decreases dramatically as variety and market volatility increase, which are both rising.

Inventory Problems. Selling products from inventory creates many problems: out-of-stocks, obsolescence, write-offs, inventory carrying costs, warehousing, and discounting to sell obsolete inventory. The inherent inventory dilemma is that trying to reduce out-of-stocks increases all the other inventory problems and vice versa.

Response Time Manufacturers of products or industrial parts may try to build products "to-order" but will not be able to deliver them quickly if they have to wait for parts, setup changes, and equipment availability.

At 512 pages, the book is the most thorough book written on the subject, but is summarized in Chapter 1, The Management Overview. The book has hundreds of sidebars and section headings.