The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence:A Leader's Guide to Achieving & Sustaining Excellence

Oct. 12, 2011 - PRLog -- Explaining how to implement and sustain a top-down strategy for manufacturing excellence, The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence: A Leader’s Guide to Achieving and Sustaining Excellence provides a comprehensive, proven approach for delivering world-class performance while also cultivating the right culture through leadership and mentoring.

Tapping into four decades of leadership experience, 35 years of it in the manufacturing industry, Larry Fast explains how to achieve vertical and horizontal alignment across your organization. He details a clear pathway to excellence via the 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence and provides a method for tracking progress—plant by plant and function by function. Emphasizing the importance of using Lean and Six Sigma tools to improve your business, the book:

* Integrates strategy and leadership development
* Paves a path for culture change–Operator-Led Process Control (OLPC)—that
   prepares hourly employees to take control of their processes and prepares
   management to enable them to do it
* Details an audit process for tracking progress and ensuring sustainability
* Includes a CD with color versions of the images in the book as well as a sample
  Manufacturing Excellence Audit, a sample Communications Plan, and a sample
  Training Plan that can all be easily customized for the reader’s use

This resource-rich book will allow you to spell out leadership expectations and provide your employees and associates with a clear understanding of their individual roles. Helping you keep everyone in your organization focused during the quest towards sustainable manufacturing excellence, the accompanying CD supplies the tools you and your team will need to pursue it with passion, confidence, and urgency.

About the Author

Larry E. Fast is a 35 year veteran of the wire and cable industry and held senior management roles for 27 of those years. At Belden, where he spent his first 25 years, he was one of the youngest Plant Managers to ever take the helm at their flagship plant in Richmond, Indiana. At that time the plant employed over 1200 people in a building of nearly 800,000 square feet. In 1982 he became the senior manufacturing leader of the Electronic Division, a position that he held for 12 years. During that time he conceived and implemented a strategy for manufacturing excellence that substantially improved manufacturing quality, service and cost. He is regarded by some as "the father of manufacturing cells" in bulk cable operations in the industry. Prior to 1987, the only known application of cell technology had been in assembly operations such as cord sets and harnesses. He later started up a new cord set division for Belden and served as the General Manager for 4 years. This experience helped to round him into a stronger manufacturing leader where his passion for excellence continued with a strong customer bias.

Fast is a long time member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), the Wire Association, and is a former member of the American Production and Inventory Control Society and the American Society for Quality. He also has served as a Section Chair for NEMA, the National Electrical Manufacturer’s Association. He has served on university advisory boards including Indiana University/Purdue at the I.U. East campus in Richmond, Indiana and the School of Applied Sciences at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. From 2001 to 2007, he served on the Industry Advisory Board for the Tauber Manufacturing Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2009 he joined the Board of Directors, SE Region of AME. Since his retirement he has also joined the team of judges for Industry Week magazine’s "Best Plants in North America" competition.

Fast has spoken at various manufacturing excellence events such as Industry Week’s Best Plant’s Conference, Manufacturer "Live", AME Champions meeting and the international conference on Lean Manufacturing sponsored by Reliability World. He has also been published in National Productivity Review magazine for the turnaround story at Belden Wire and Cable and was featured in two October, 2006 articles in The Manufacturer and in Mexico Watch for the outstanding track record leading change at General Cable Corporation. Fast is now Founder & President of Pathways to Manufacturing Excellence, LLC, a consulting company based in Gainesville, GA.

ISBN:  9781439876046,  266 pp., Hardback, $39.95

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