Peer Review

Beyond Lean: Simulation in Practice, Second Edition

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Reviewed:: May 31, 2022 by Business

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

Lean thinking, as well as associated processes and tools, have involved into a ubiquitous perspective for improving systems, particularly in the manufacturing arena. With application experience has come an understanding of the boundaries of lean capabilities and the benefits of getting beyond these boundaries to further improve performance. Discrete event simulation is recognized as one beyond-the-boundaries of lean technique. Thus, the fundamental goal of this text is to show how discrete event simulation can be used in addition to lean thinking to achieve greater benefits in system improvement than with lean alone. Realizing this goal requires learning the problems that simulation solves as well as the methods required to solve them. The problems that simulation solves are captured in a collection of case studies. These studies serve as metaphors for industrial problems that are commonly addressed using lean and simulation.

Type of Material:

Open (Access) Textbook

Recommended Uses:

This can be used in many different situations, including aspects in lectures, homework assignments for individuals or teams, and class discussions.

Technical Requirements:

Firefox 32.0.0.330

Java 8 Update 241

Adobe Reader Plugin for Firefox

Adobe Flash – FP 32 for Firefox

This book may be download as PDF from this site.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

Learn how discrete event simulation can be used in addition to lean thinking to achieve greater benefits in system improvement than with lean thinking alone.

Target Student Population:

Operations management and supply chain management in the upper-undergraduate level or graduate level continuous improvement,
TQM, operations management, supply chain management.
This information can also be used for professional development.

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Users should be familiar with Lean, supply chain management, continuous improvement, and operations management.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

A comprehensive open-source textbook that provides theoretical concepts on lean simulation.
Textbook includes application exemplars for course work and practice.
Textbook provides information on how to develop models to use in simulation and to better predict or validate the future state.
The focus of the book is on how to build and use models to enhance Lean transformations, or in other words, to go beyond lean and understand how the steps are connected.
Various manufacturing environments are included in the different chapters.

Concerns:

PDF version only.
Last update was in 2013.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

The textbook provides complex case studies that require foundational knowledge in addition to the content presented.
Would consider a high level of rigor for upper-division courses.
Details and step-by-step approaches for simulations are provided, identified by phases and tactics. Principles for simulation modeling and experimentation are provided, based on the laws of basic science and mathematics.

Concerns:

Requires foundational knowledge as a pre-requisite.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

Details and step-by-step approaches for simulations are provided, identified by phases and tactics.
Principles for simulation modeling and experimentation are provided, based on the laws of basic science and mathematics.

Concerns:

This is very sophisticated and requires prerequisite knowledge in areas previously noted such as operations management, supply chain management, Lean methodologies and perhaps Kaizen.
PDF format can have limited accessibility.

Other Issues and Comments:

For review purposes, Chapter 1 was the primary focus and parts of other chapters were included.
Thank you for providing an open-source textbook that reduces financial barriers to learning.

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