Friday, July 27, 2012

Goldratt On Operations Management

Author E.M. Goldratt recently passed away. For those interested in operations management, I highly recommend reading his work. I read his first book, The Goal, a few years ago and it remains one of my favourite books of all time.

The book is a novel, but what makes it interesting is not the story itself but the operations concepts the story helps bring to life. The main character runs a factory that is going out of business thanks to conventional concepts of efficiency and productivity.

With the help of a consultant, however, the manager learns a number of unconventional and counter-intuitive concepts that slowly help improve overall performance. It's a quick read, so much so that I recently read the book again since I enjoyed it so much the first time.

Inspired by this book, I also read the sequel, It's Not Luck. While the newer book does introduce a number of interesting new concepts, it's not nearly as illustrative as The Goal in my opinion.

Have you read these books? What did you think?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love the goal. Read it as part of my MBA reading material. Certainly helped me understand how to do better in our own company's operations.