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.

Dr. Anderson is the world's leading expert on showing companies how to build standard and mass-customized products on-demand without forecasts or inventory.

Dr. Anderson was appointed guest editor for the Mass Customization issue of the Agility Forum's journal, Agility & Global Competition (Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1998).

Starting in 1989, he has facilitated the Suzaki/SME video program, Techniques for Continuous Improvement, on eliminating waste, reducing lead times, implementing flow, improving productivity, and reducing setup, batch size, and inventory.

He taught two courses on BTO for the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), after which he lead two AME plant tours at Pentair's Hoffman plant, which, based on Dr. Anderson s principles, build a $30,000,000 plant to build on-demand a wide variety of mass-customized and standard sheet-metal enclosures.

He also wrote the book on DFM, literally and figuratively: Design for Manufacturability; How to Use Concurrent Engineering to Rapidly Develop Low-Cost, High-Quality Products for Lean Production (2014, Productivity Press, 486 pages). At the Management of Technology Program at the University of California at Berkeley, he created and taught the course New Product Development.

His book-length website is on the subject, Half Cost Products, with that title as the URL.

Dr. Anderson has over 35 years of industrial experience and has trained many leading companies who have implemented principles from this book. As Manager of Flexible Manufacturing at Intel's Systems Group, he developed manufacturing strategies, designed flexible tooling, and initiated their successful programs for standardization and DFM.

For seven years, his own company, Anderson Automation, Inc., built special production equipment for companies such as IBM and Optical Coating Labs and generated production equipment design studies for SRI International, Clorox Manufacturing, and two divisions of FMC. He has been issued four patents and is working on more.

Dr. Anderson is a Fellow of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and has been certified as a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) by the Institute of Management Consultants. He holds professional engineering (P.E.) registrations in Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering and a Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Anderson can be reached at (805) 924-0100 or anderson@build-to-order-consulting.com.