The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox · North River Press
Goldratt's business novel follows a plant manager applying the Theory of Constraints to a failing factory, introducing throughput, inventory, operating expense, bottleneck identification, and the five focusing steps through narrative rather than equations.
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More resources on Manufacturing Systems
AllAboutLean.com
Christoph Roser, a production management professor and former Toyota employee, publishes free long-form articles on line balancing, buffer sizing, job shop versus flow shop layouts, pull systems, and the Kingman formula, with worked numbers and plant photos.
Little's Law as Viewed on Its 50th Anniversary
John Little's fiftieth-anniversary review of L = λW, the relation tying work in process to throughput and cycle time. Covers proofs, underlying assumptions, extensions, and applications across operations management and computer architecture. Peer-reviewed, the paper states exactly when the law holds and when it does not.
Factory Physics: Foundations of Manufacturing Management (3rd Edition)
Hopp and Spearman build a quantitative science of production: variability, queueing behavior, Little's Law, push versus pull control, capacity and lead time, then connect those laws to MRP, lean, six sigma, and supply chain practice.