Factory physics

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1. horeszkoOct 2023
   Factory Physics - Hopp, Spearman

   Great book on manufacturing operations management that I consider to be one of the best technical books on the subject.

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2. DavidPeifferDec 2020
   I'm an industrial engineer. The book that got me started on that path was Cheaper By the Dozen, which we listened to on cassette tape on most road trips >2 hours growing up. I was fascinated by the thought of taking a process or procedure and eliminating as much non-value add time as possible, which they did throughout their lives on things like tonsillectomies for their kids.

   Some impactful books on the whole field include Factory Physics (focusing on material flow through a factory) and The Toyota Way (focusing on lean manufacturing).

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3. jacques_chesterJul 2020
   > Out of curiosity, why don't more of such production lines have dedicated machines that each do one small/simple action and then send it to the next one.

   Specialising your tools or machines comes at a cost: inflexibility, specifically changeover time between different products. If your machine can only do exactly one thing, the changeover time is "physically replace the machine", which may mean a delay of months.

   Changeover time is a massive, hard-to-see drag on everything in a factory. The ideal manufacturing machine station can instantly switch its use between any two consecutive products moving along the line. Physically impossible, but ideal. Fully-programmable robots are much closer to that ideal than single-purpose machines.

   That said, the tradeoff depends on the product/process spectrum. Some products are produced in "job shops", meaning an extremely flexible, high-touch environment, turning out very short runs. Others are worker-paced or machine-paced (which is what the Playstation factory would count as), mostly this is used for consumer goods. These still retain some flexibility, as much as sensibly possible.

   At the far end are "continuous process" plants. These are very specialised to the product. Bottling plants, chemical plants, oil refineries and so on, where flexibility is not a highly meaningful advantage and the product lends itself to being treated as an undifferentiated flow as opposed to discrete units of product.

   I recommend Matching Supply with Demand by Cachon & Terweisch as a first book to read. Then follow with the more in-depth Factory Physics by Hopp & Spearman.

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4. jacques_chesterOct 2019
   What I wish I had is a book that introduces control engineering in some depth for software folks like me.

   I wanted to write such a book, or half of such a book, as a second part of Knative in Action. I wrote a simulator[0] and did a ton of reading which felt like I'd barely scratched the surface of the surface.

   But really, there's just no room for what I wanted to do. Based on a simple estimate it would have run to about 200 pages on top of another 250 pages of actually-about-Knative material. So that whole section wound on the cutting room floor. Maybe another time.

   In terms of books I felt helped me the most down this road, here's a reasonable reading list I'd point to:

   Feedback Control for Computer Systems: Introducing Control Theory to Enterprise Programmers, by Philipp Janert. Short, to-the-point introduction to basic classical control theory using PID controllers.

   Matching Supply with Demand: An Introduction to Operations Management by Cachon and Terweisch. A short, meant-for-MBAs textbook on operations management (ie applied operations research). Simple and approachable. Very good for warming up to...

   Factory Physics by Hopp and Spearman. Magisterial in scope, also magisterial in grumpiness and idiosyncracy. I've directly applied material from this book and Matching to research work.

   Business Dynamics by Sterman. Still the best system dynamics book I've ever read. I'm anxiously waiting for the 2nd edition, expected circa 2021.

   Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems: Queueing Theory in Action by Harchol-Balter. Approachable and enlightening. I stumbled on a few of the proofs and got lost once or twice in thickets of notation, but that's due to my own mathematical immaturity more than the book itself.

   But I still don't have a book to refer to for the specifics of software dynamics, spanning its physics and economics. And I wish I did. I would love to read that book, if folks can make recommendations.

   [0] https://github.com/pivotal/skenario

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5. tumbaAug 2019
   Some of these aren’t bad. The Goal, for example, is a great book for helping you build intuition about constraints. But by far, the best manufacturing book I’ve read is Factory Physics, but Hopp and Spearman. It rewards study with a mathematical understanding of how value chains work.

   https://factoryphysics.com/factory-physics-3rd-edition

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6. jacques_chesterMar 2019
   If you want to go deeper (much deeper) on Little's Law, Kingman's Formula and their friends, I highly recommend working through Factory Physics by Hopp & Spearman. It's a thorough coverage and is packed with useful insights.
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