This book would have been somewhat redundant if written, say, 20 years
ago. That is because, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, best-practice case
reports were being published regularly in many professional/practitioner
periodicals: Target (Association for Manufacturing Excellence), Industrial
Engineer–renamed ISE (Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers or
IISE), Quality Progress (American Society for Quality), Manufacturing
Engineering (Society for Manufacturing Engineers), Journal of Supply Chain
Management (formerly, International Journal of Purchasing and Materials
Management, Institute for Supply Chain Management), APICS Magazine
(American Production and Inventory Control Society), Production
and Inventory Management Journal (also APICS), Assembly Magazine,
Quality Digest, Business Week—renamed Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The
Manufacturer (U.K. and U.S.), Works Management (U.K., publisher of
Best Factory awards), Management Today (U.K.); also, more specialized
publications such as Material Handling and Logistics, American Machinist,
and Cost Management (which was the main font of papers on the costmanagement impact of flow manufacturing; formerly called the Journal of Cost Management, it went out of business as a published periodical in2013).