Book Reviews

Production & Inventory Management In The Technological Age

By Paul Deis

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

I found a book written in 1983 by one of our own LAPICS members. The book is a goldmine! I am surprised and a bit frustrated that I couldnot find it in the APICS book offerings.

The amazing thing about this book is that if you read it without looking at the publishing date you would just assume it was recently written. One would assume, as I have done, that since so much has happened in the area of P&IM that any book written years ago must be obsolete. However, this is a book that deals with P&IM from the standpoint of using a single database as the basic building block of a well developed MRPII system. Although that last statement sounds so simple that one must question that if companies don't develop MRPII around a single database do they really understand the use of MRPII, the recent LAPICS war cry of "back to the basics" leads me to believe that they don't.

What I liked about this book is that it is in essence a book that deals with "back to the basics", but not as the basics existed twenty years ago in the early days of MRP, but as the basics exist today in light of modern information systems. In addition to the great presentation this book makes in using information systems to support day to day transactions it also has sections that deals with information systems as they support business planing, the difference between the somewhat failed U.S. approach and the more successful Japenese approach to computers, and the use of information systems in the future. In the section entitled The Present is the Future, discussions on Group Technology, Kanban, Syncro-MRP, Automatic Storage/Retrieval Systems and other topics that U.S. companies are just now discovering are included.

If you are serious about a "back to the basics" approach that works in today's modern information system and that really addresses the use of computers as a means to incresed efficency and profitability then I suggest you get a copy of this book ASAP. Good reading!