Business professors publish book on cellular manufacturing

Professor Urban Wemmerlöv, director of the Erdman Center for Manufacturing and Technology Management at UW–Madison’s School of Business, has co-authored “Reorganizing the Factory: Competing through Cellular Manufacturing” with Nancy Hyer of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

The book is a comprehensive life-cycle approach to implementing cellular manufacturing in the workplace, both on the factory floor and in the office. One reviewer called the book “a must read for organizations who want to use cellular manufacturing to gain competitive advantage” while another claimed the authors had “decoded the DNA of cellular manufacturing.”

Streamlining work processes into cells has helped many organizations achieve shorter lead times, higher quality, and lower costs. “Reorganizing the Factory” pinpoints the managerial issues that accompany organizing work into cells. Hyer and Wemmerlöv find that in most implementations, performance measurement, compensation, education and training, employee involvement, and change management are critically important. These issues are often overlooked in the planning process, yet occupy more of the implementation time than do the more technical aspects of cells. Technical dimensions of cells, such as factory analysis, planning and control systems, and principles for lead time and inventory reduction are, however, also covered in depth in this 770-page book.

Wemmerlöv is the Kress Family Wisconsin Distinguished Professor in the School of Business at UW–Madison. He holds a B.S. in business, an M.S. in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in production management from Lund University in Sweden, and an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute and a certified fellow of the American Production and Inventory Control Society. Hyer is associate professor of management at Vanderbilt University. The book is published by Productivity Press, Portland, Ore.