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Informationen zum Autor Patricia E. Moody is the former editor of AME's Target magazine, where she created breakthrough work on teams, Kaizen, new product development, and supply chain issues. She is a well-known manufacturing management consultant and writer with more than twenty-five years of industry and consulting experience. Her client list includes such industry leaders as Solectron, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, and Mead Corporation. Klappentext How will autonomous agents, emergent systems, and chaos theory change the way we live and work in the twenty-first century? As today's manufacturing and production systems grow increasingly complex, tomorrow's science of complexity will produce paradoxically simple solutions, argue technology experts Patricia Moody and Richard Morley in this astonishing vision of the year 2020.Containing both cutting-edge insights and simple truths that provide a roadmap to the future of business -- and illustrated by case examples from such companies as Motorola, Honda, GM, Solectron, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Modicon, Flavors, NeXT, Japanese Railway, and Andover Controls -- The Technology Machine challenges readers to understand the spirit and core drivers of growth: technology, knowledge, and individual excellence.By combining rigorous research with their extensive experience with technology advances that have changed industry, Moody and Morley are able to supply simple guidelines for future growth and detail their keen vision of future systems, leaders, and workers. They isolate the three bad business habits at the root of manufacturing problems today -- shortsightedness, restrictive structures, and unbalanced improvement fads -- show how to break them, and supply four infallible predictors of the types of breakthrough technologies that will come to dominate the world of the future. In that world, customers and suppliers are linked by real-time, online systems; business is driven by customer-designed, point-of-consumption replication of product; and a wide gap grows between "The Island of Excellence" organization of the future -- with its holistic approach, including two-year apprenticeships, uniforms, and morning exercises -- and "The Others," the non-elite, sweatshop-like, breakeven companies of the past. The book is eloquent, original, and essential reading for managers in every area of business and industry. Chapter One: How Manufacturing Will Work Chaos, Pain, and Transformation When Francis Cabot Lowell, through a supreme act of industrial espionage, memorized the guts of the English power loom systems he had seen in 1811 on an extended stay in Great Britain, he launched a two-hundred-year run for American manufacturing. Lowell pulled together all the disparate functions of the textile production process -- carding, dyeing, spinning, weaving, bleaching, tasks that had been contracted out to rural farmwives and small shops -- and arranged them in sequence in a single site, a new four-story mill on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, the prototype for thousands of factories that followed. The first experiment was successful beyond the incorporators' dreams, a money machine; 200 percent profits fueled more and bigger mills -- Lowell, Lawrence, Lynn, and Manchester, New Hampshire's Amoskeag complex, the biggest cotton plant in the world -- more innovation, and urban communities of mill workers. The golden era for manufacturing had begun. A Dedication to Bricks and Mortar But process innovation and dedication to scale did not come without some pain. Complete vertical integration of the textile process led to captive company workers, Taylorism, piece rates, and huge profits. The brief utopian era of the mill girls -- educated Yankee farm girls who left the countryside for an average of two years' work in the mill city of Lowell, where they attended concerts and lectures and shopped for machine-mad...
