The top three search result from Google when you search for โlean manufacturing booksโ is โThe Machine That Changed the World,โ โThe Toyota Way,โ and โLearning to See.โ
What Lean Manufacturing books are you reading, or have you read?
The Machine That Changed the World
Book by Daniel Roos, Daniel T. Jones, and James P. Womack
The Machine That Changed the World is a 1991 book based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's \$5 million, five-year study on the future of the automobile, written by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos.
This book made the term lean production known worldwide. It has been translated into eleven languages and has been sold more than 600,000 times. A revised edition was published in 2007.
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World's Greatest Manufacturer
Book by Jeffrey K. Liker
In factories around the world, Toyota consistently makes the highest-quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer, while using fewer man-hours, less on-hand inventory, and half the floor space of its competitors. The Toyota Way is the first book for a general audience that explains the management principles and business philosophy behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.
Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Add Value and Eliminate Muda
Book by Mike Rother, John Shook
Much more important, these simple maps - often drawn on scrap paper - showed where steps could be eliminated, flows smoothed, and pull systems introduced in order to create a truly lean value stream for each product family.
In 1998 John teamed with Mike Rother of the University of Michigan to write down Toyota's mapping methodology for the first time in Learning to See. This simple tool makes it possible for you to see through the clutter of a complex plant. You'll soon be able to identify all of the processing steps along the path from raw materials to finished goods for each product and all of the information flows going back from the customer through the plant and upstream to suppliers. With this knowledge in hand it is much easier to envision a "future state" for each product family in which wasteful actions are eliminated and production can be pulled smoothly ahead by the customer.