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In western manufacturing, the more manual a process, the more severe the competitive handicap of high wages. Full automation would make labor costs irrelevant but remain impractical in most industries. Most successful manufacturing processes in advanced economies are neither fully manual nor fully automatic -- they involve interactions between small numbers of highly skilled people and machines that account for the bulk of the manufacturing costs and thereby remain competitive.

In "Working with Machines: The Nuts and Bolts of Lean Operations With Jidoka," author Michel Baudin explains how performance differences that can be observed between factories are due to the way people use the machines -- from the human interfaces of individual machines to the linking of machines into cells, the management of monuments and common services, autonomation, maintenance, and production control.

This compelling book: Emphasizes the importance of the "Jidoka" pillar of the Toyota Production System, which is engineering the way people work with machines.Deals with the art of bringing groups of machines together into "cells."Addresses the problematic issues associated with "monuments" - those machines that provide services for production lines across a broad variety of products, but cannot be organized into cells.Compares automation as it has been developed in the US, as a stand-alone discipline with a lean manufacturing approach, to the management of automated systems implemented before a plant started its lean conversion.

This book provides manufacturing managers and engineers, lean champions and consultants withstrategies and tools to make the technical and managerial decisions that turn working with machines into a lasting business success.