42 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine
With
machinery
purchases,
small
can
be
beautiful
This article's "ancient" roots
Although Richard J. Schonberger submitted this article to ISE magazine in 2017, its roots are
much older – at least three decades, in fact.
Schonberger said he found a dot matrix printout of the manuscript while wading through
stacks of old paperwork. The faded but legible copy was not dated, but the title page identified
Schonberger as George Cook Professor of Management, University of Nebraska – a title he
received in 1985, the same year he moved from Nebraska to Seattle with his wife.
Obviously, he had intended to send the piece somewhere for publication but hadn't.
Schonberger has been writing a lot about the subject recently (See "Planning for Concurrent
Production" in the February 2015 issue of this magazine, then called Industrial Engineer –
www.iise.org/IEmagazine/Feb2015/Schonberger.)
The article is almost as written originally, other than replacing the term just-in-time (JIT)
production with the successor term lean – not to mention discussion of using a smartphone
app. Running this article as if it was written today confirms Schonberger's and the editors' core
belief that much of industrial engineering's lore is timeless and holds value over decades.