Book Review

All I Need To Know About Manufacturing I Learned in Joe's Garage

By William Miller and Vicki Schenk

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

The authors are principals of the W. Miller & Co. consulting firm. They are both professionally certified in several disciplines, including ISO 9000.

The purpose of this book, as described on the front cover, is to make world class manufacturing simple. It is very effective in that respect. The book is very quick reading as it is a soft bound book with less than 100 pages. In fact, you can probably read the entire book in about two hours. The book is a novel about Joe, a Vice President of Manufacturing for a gear manufacturing company called Garrett Co., and how he spent one Saturday with about 20 of his friends building shelves in his garage.

The book is told through the eyes of one of the Garrett workers, who happens also to report to Joe, and is spiced up with his interactions with Ralph, one of his neighbors who works for a Japanese gear making company. Of course, Ralph knows how Joe works to get things done at the plant and this is the interesting thing. Joe has determined that he can complete the building of all the shelves in his garage, except for the painting, in one afternoon by laying out the job as he would do it in his plant. He has gone to the trouble to have plans made out and has organized his yard by job function. Ralph asked if he could participate in the project because he wanted to meet Joe and perhaps learn something from him since Ralph was going to have to get his garage organized one of these days. However, he spent the whole day questioning why Joe would do something the way he did it, because the Japanese way would be completely different.

As Bill and Vicki point out in the final thoughts sections of the book, "To many readers, as to us, Joe and the events in his garage are only TOO real. If you are in an environment where you are still clinging to age old American manufacturing ideas and want to see how the Japanese ideas might be applied, this is a book you can not do without. In addition to presenting the ideas in a novel, the pages that separate the chapters are filled with nothing but short interesting quotes like, "Progress requires change; if you never change, you will never progress," or "A fool and his inventory are never parted."

Good reading!