Maximizing Profit: How to Measure the Financial Impact of Manufacturing Decisions

Maximizing Profit is unique in its coverage of the financial accounting measures that pertain to the profitability of advanced manufacturing operations. It provides actionable techniques to help managers assess their current practices and employ new ways of thinking about the business plan.

Highlights Include:

• Revealing counter-productive performance measures
• Identifying the operational objectives that will realize the greatest profits
• Managing with optimization techniques
• Reassessing the make-or-buy decision
• Incorporating lean manufacturing activities into the aggregate plan
• Rethinking traditional capital project ranking techniques
• Measuring the financial impact of multiplant operations.

  Employing a hypothetical company case study, based on the author's actual experiences, Maximizing Profit guides you through a series of common manufacturing decisions such as product mix, process improvement, make-or-buy, and capital investment. A CD with an interactive Excel Solver spreadsheet tool an optimization algorithm is included that allows you to follow the team in the case study step-by-step as they shed prior assumptions and use optimization techniques to inform decisions.

  Maximizing Profit's practical information on the major decisions that will increase cash flow make it a "must read" and "must have" book for managers in manufacturing entities, specifically, general managers, manufacturing/operations managers, controllers, manufacturing/industrial engineers, and purchasing managers, as well as students of industrial business management.

Section I: Manufacturing Activities are Ultimately Expressed in Financial Terms

Chapter 1: Operational Improvements Don't Necessarily Translate to Financial Success

Section II: Exposing the Existing Counter-Productive Performance Measures

Chapter 2: The Standard Cost System: Manufacturing's Millstone
Chapter 3: Maximizing Gross Profit: Introduction to Optimization Techniques

Section III: Maximizing Return on Investment (R.O.I.) is the Ultimate Objective: How to Get There is the Great Challenge

Chapter 4: Which Operational Objective Will produce the Most Profit?

Section IV: Getting the Most From What You Have: Learning How to Manage with Optimization Techniques

Chapter 5: Measuring the Financial Benefits of Manufacturing Process Improvements
Chapter 6: A New Look at the Make or Buy Decision
Chapter 7: How to Evaluate New Business with Optimization Techniques
Chapter 8: Should we Be a Subcontractor?

Section V: Selective Growth and System Expansion Using Optimization Techniques

Chapter 9: Optimizing the Capital Budget with Better Measurement of the Financial Benefits from Proposed Equipment Additions
Chapter 10: Rethinking Traditional Capital Project Ranking Techniques

Section VI: Illustrating the Aggregate Planning Process

Chapter 11: Developing the Aggregate Plan Using Optimization Techniques
Chapter 12: Incorporating Lean Manufacturing Activities (and Other Operational Improvements) into the Aggregate Plan
Chapter 13: Capital Budgeting is Just One Step in the Seamless Process
Chapter 14: Finalizing the Aggregate Planning Process

Section VII: Evaluating Multiple Plant Operations Using Optimization Techniques

Chapter 15: Measuring the Real Financial Impact of Multiplant Operations

Section VIII: Summary - Retracing the Steps to Becoming a User of Optimization Techniques

Chapter 16: Summarizing OpTek's Journey from Traditional Activities to Optimization Techniques

Section IX: Appendices

Appendix A: Activity Based Costing (ABC): Determination of ABC Rates Presented in Chapter 2
Appendix B: Using Excel Solver to Execute the OpTek Algorithm
Appendix C: West Coast Processors: A Case Study
Appendix D: Other Proponents and Applications of Optimization Techniques

Glossary
Index