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Operations & Retail Excellence track

Improve how work flows through a business, and understand shoppers, stores and supply chains.

4 steps7 books4 course shelvesFor operators, supply-chain, retail and FMCG professionals

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Start here

A business novel and a company study that introduce flow and continuous improvement.

The Goal

Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox

This novel follows a plant manager trying to rescue a struggling factory. Through his story, Eliyahu Goldratt introduces the Theory of Constraints, which focuses improvement on the bottleneck that limits overall output. Useful for operations and project managers.

Other languages and editions

    The Toyota Way

    Jeffrey K. Liker

    Jeffrey Liker sets out fourteen principles that he identifies behind Toyota's approach to management and production, covering long-term thinking, continuous improvement and respect for people. Useful for operations leaders who want to understand lean as a management culture, not just a toolkit.

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      Build the skills

      Lean thinking and how IT and operations work together.

      Lean Thinking

      James P. Womack & Daniel T. Jones

      Womack and Jones lay out five principles of lean: specify value, map the value stream, create flow, let customers pull, and pursue perfection. They show how organisations beyond manufacturing can use these ideas to remove waste.

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        The Phoenix Project

        Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford

        A novel in which an IT manager is handed a struggling, high-stakes project at a manufacturing firm, used to show how lean and flow ideas from factories apply to IT operations and DevOps. It gives technology and operations readers a story-led introduction.

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          Go deeper

          Shopper behaviour, the changing retail industry and a retail founder’s story.

          Why We Buy

          Paco Underhill

          Paco Underhill draws on years of observing how people move through shops to explain what shapes their buying behaviour, such as the layout of a store. Retailers, designers and marketers can learn how small details of the environment affect what shoppers do.

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            Put it to work

            Turn one idea into a store, supply-chain, category or operating experiment.

            This week: Turn one idea into a store, supply-chain, category, distribution or operating experiment.