(Part 2) Best production & operations books according to redditors
We found 100 Reddit comments discussing the best production & operations books. We ranked the 28 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Everything is over crowded. Even if you don't have any direct competition, your potential customers are inundated with choices to spend their money on that aren't you. People spend way too much time thinking about how inundated a market is. And not enough time thinking about how they can truly innovate and differentiate themselves.
Your description of what you're trying to solve is this: I have a group of friends and we'd like to buy a gift for one of our friends.
I might break that task into a series of steps:
And on and on this goes.
To innovate, just start eliminating or combining steps. Figure out something in this list where you could start making things easier. It sounds like your thinking along some of the right lines, but what if your algrorithm comes up short. Maybe it should also anonymously message the person or the person's closest friend about hobbies they've been into.
You could eliminiate the voting steps above. Make that list of suggested gifts some kind of Reddit style list so I know what my friends would prefer we get as a group.
This is the thinking exercise I've been using with Draft software I've created to help people write better. There's a million word processors and distraction free editors out there. But I spend a lot of time just analyzing the tasks I have as a writer and all the steps those tasks have.
I've been able to create a tool that's very different than other online editors. Google Docs doesn't have on-demand copy-editing. But that's a common task writers have. So I built it in.
If you spend enough time drilling into tasks people have, there's all sorts of areas you can innovative. I highly recommend an easy read and a great kick in the ass along this line of thinking: Something Really New.
It really depends on what your goal is for the reference and if you have any further education or learning goals beyond it.
The Management of Mineral Resources book will help you understand the decisions of you company executives and provide decent insight into what decisions may be coming next depending on the economic and financial environment, but is weakened in its overall usefulness in that all the problems given and solved are already all pre-scoped, and that some of the advice and direction can be ludicrously wrong from operation to operation. On top of that the information aggregation and decision making process is all about 3-4 levels above the actual operations, and so will be completely different to anything you are likely seeing currently or in the near-to-mid future.
The Mine Manager's Handbook is useful to understand the Mine Manager's decision and process (the obvious answer, I know), but I suspect from looking through the contents pages it is mainly about dealing with constraint and polling responsible parties while providing direction rather than identifying, solving, and optimising approaches to issues.
A more general reference like Operations Management for Competitive Advantage is so general that you will often wonder how you could apply it to your current circumstance (and examples in books like that are almost exclusively manufacturing or supply-chain related), but gives you the insight into the driving factors of decisions from the bottom-up. This is the book if you want to understand how the blast crew, mining maintenance planning, mineral process group, grade control, et al. manage to actually create a final product in a reasonable time, cost, and continuously. So it is a book about the individual steps to The Dance that is the many hundreds of daily interactions and compromises that make an operation function, while the Mine Manager's Handbook is about choreography and managing the dancers, and the Management of Mineral Resources is about producing and selling the music video the dance is in. Hopefully that analogy isn't too forced or ridiculous.
On a personal front, I tend to dislike the first kind of book as it is designed around MBAs coming in without a great understanding of the industries that are being written about (so, for people focused on business, rather than people who focused on an industry then wanted the business knowledge). The second kind of book is a useful reference on the various groups that need to be managed, but (likely) focuses on directing, managing, and integrating their output rather than understanding or producing the outputs, and often times most of the information that the book contains could be easily had at any time with a simple question at work (and if the question are discourage then you have a useful bit of info about your corporation and your value in it). And the last kind of book is a good learning resource, and useful to the times in your career where you may be in other industries, but requires a lot of personal thought on "where the hell does this apply in what I am looking at?"
Operations Management is pretty neat and useful stuff to go into and study and is one of those fields where so many people think they know what is going on (because they have studied Project Management) but are usually unaware of the real driving factors and directions.
Sounds like you are interested in Operations Research as a discipline.
If you are looking for something to give you ideas about what longterm projects and outcomes look like, something like this book here(The Applied Business Analytics Casebook: Applications in Supply Chain Management, Operations Management, and Operations Research) might be good.
If you are looking for something more hands on, then either the Rardin or Nocedal and Wright books might be a good starting point.
Operations Management - Nigel Slack is a well known author in this field and I've found this book helpful in my MSc. It is quite broad and covers a lot of topics. If I were to buy any book I'd buy this one (but buy it second hand unless you are rich).
If you are looking at organizational culture and behavior I can vouch for Management & Organisational Behaviour. Mastering the key models in this book will help you create a more productive and pleasant business. If you are looking at progressing into or further within a leadership role then I would definitely give this a read.
If you work in manufacturing or something a little less service based then The Lean Toolbox is an absolutely excellent guide, although the publishers really could have done with adding some colour. It was recommended to my by some consultants who used to work in Toyota's leadership. A lot of information, that is a lot of help.
If you are looking at business from a process perspective Business Process Management is quite good.
If you want a decent read, something not textbooky and more like a story then The Goal is good, but uses Goldratt's theory of constraints approach which can be viewed as a little dated in comparison with more modern business transformation philosophies. Still good though!
I've just have 1 book that I want to finish this summer, though I have a backlog of several hundred I'd like to read at some point. The Six Sigma Handbook It isn't exactly the most entertaining read (it is interesting), but how often is technical writing entertaining (some of his mistakes are amusing at least).
This is what we suggest for first years at our university. It is very accessible and while maybe not inspiring as a whole (abstract_brotha is right; textbooks are rarely inspiring), a good overview of the area with some 'inspiring' research in there too.
Looking for this book
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Operations-Management-Sustainability-Student/dp/0134183959
Can be older edition, please send the cheapest price possible
As everybody else here says in different ways, do these three steps
1: find out the business problems people are trying to solve by going to where they work and sitting down with them. LITERALLY where they work. The gemba, as it's called
2: this will tell you the decisions they need to make.
3: this will tell you the data they need to make these decisions. A handy heuristic, once you've started providing data ask the recipients what decisions they COULDN'T make if they stopped getting it. If they couldn't think of any, you're providing the wrong data.
Have a read of what people have found before you. They've written it up so you can learn it quicker than they did.
I'd define myself as a systems thinker, and so what I'd recommend is skewed towards that way of thinking
This guy is good and has a book coming out soon specifically about how data can provide value when analysed properly.
https://www.leanblog.org/tag/process-behavior-charts/
This guy writes well about something most analysts have never heard of it, it's worth an hour of your time and is invaluable. Trust me, browse it.
There's HUGE amounts of brilliant stuff online. One of the best books I've ever read on this is Understanding Variation, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-Variation-Key-Managing-Chaos/dp/0945320531
It's short, oriented to problem solving and process understanding, and eminently practical.
Your job sounds brilliant by the way, but don't get bogged down in learning software packages. People who receive your output need to know what it MEANS. This can often be left out of fancy pretty graphs. Analysis should produce insight, not just the workings out. Get to know the business and be a business person, not just a data person. Data has no meaning stripped of context, and you should steep yourself in context.