Production and Operations Management Made Simple: Planning, Producing, and Delivering, Explained
Huynh, Kiet
Synopsis "Production and Operations Management Made Simple: Planning, Producing, and Delivering, Explained"
Why does one furniture shop ship every order on time while an almost identical one down the road keeps promising dates it can't hit? This book answers that question through one small manufacturer, Thornbury Furniture Works, followed chapter by chapter as its operations manager, Elena Marsh, replaces guesswork with a method — the same methods taught in university operations courses, worked through with a pencil and a calculator instead of buried in notation. Inside, you'll find: A regression model that turns regional building-permit counts into a forecast Elena can defend to the bank — Orders = 2.0 × Permits + 30, with an R² of 0.9910 — and the tracking signal that catches the method drifting out of control the moment it crosses ±4 MAD. A value-analysis table that sorts five real products by profit margin and revenue share, and finds the one earning Thornbury's best margin sitting nearly invisible in total sales — worth more shelf space, not more advertising. A facility-location decision settled by real money: a transportation model that prices a new plant in Briarcreek, Tennessee against a rival site in Hartwell, North Carolina and finds a $30,000-a-year edge that three other methods couldn't agree on. A shop-floor queue of five overdue orders, sequenced four different ways, showing exactly how "fastest on average" and "fair to the customer who needs it most" pull in opposite directions — and the one hybrid rule that gets most of both. A $12,000 inventory decision worked two ways — an EOQ order-quantity model and a marginal-analysis stocking rule with a 0.318 critical ratio — so you can see why the "right" order size changes with the question being asked. Written for office workers, new accountants, small business owners, and accounting or operations students, with a self-drawn chart, table, or diagram for every single subsection — no stock photos, no filler illustrations, just the numbers worked out where you can check them. Every formula in this book comes with the same three things, in the same order: one plain sentence on the real problem it solves, a full list of what each symbol means, and a worked example using clean numbers you can follow by hand.
