New To This Edition

Four New Video Case Studies Featuring Alaska Airlines

In this edition we take you behind the scenes of Alaska Airlines, consistently rated as one of the top carriers in North America. This fascinating organization opened its doors–and planes–so we could examine leading-edge OM in the airline industry. We observe the quality program at Alaska Air (Chapter 6), the process analysis behind the airline’s 20-minute baggage retrieval guarantee (Chapter 7), how Alaska empowers its employees (Chapter 10), and the airline’s use of Lean, 5s, kaizen, and Gemba walks (Chapter 16). These videos, and other video case studies that feature real companies, can be found in MyLab Operations Management.

New Sustainability in the Supply Chain Supplement 5

We have enhanced the coverage of sustainability in this edition with the inclusion of a brand-new supplement that covers the topics of corporate social responsibility, design and production for sustainability, and regulations and industry standards.

Creating Your Own Excel Spreadsheets

We continue to provide two free decision support software programs, Excel OM for Windows and Mac and POM for Windows, to help you and your students solve homework problems and case studies. These excellent packages are found in MyLab Operations Management’s Download Center.

Many instructors also encourage students to develop their own Excel spreadsheet models to tackle OM issues. With this edition we provide numerous examples at chapter end on how to do so. “Creating Your Own Excel Spreadsheets” examples now appear in Chapters 2, 4, 8, 12, and Supplement 6, Supplement 7, and Modules A, and F. We hope these 8 samples will help expand students’ spreadsheet capabilities.

Expanding and Reordering Our Set of Homework Problems

We believe that a vast selection of quality homework problems, ranging from easy to challenging (denoted by one to four dots), is critical for both instructors and students. Instructors need a broad selection of problems to choose from for homework, quizzes, and exams–without reusing the same set from semester to semester. We take pride in having more problems than any other OM text. We added dozens of new problems this edition.

Further, with the majority of our adopters now using the MyLab Operations Management learning system in their classes, we have reorganized all the homework problems–both those appearing in the printed text and the additional homework problems that are available in MyLab Operations Management–by topic heading. We identify all problems by topic.

The list of all problems by topic also appears at the end of each boxed example as well as in the Rapid Review that closes each chapter. These handy references should make it easier to assign problems for homework, quizzes, and exams. A rich set of assignable problems and cases makes the learning experience more complete and pedagogically sound.

Lean Operations

In previous editions we sought to explicitly differentiate the concepts of just-in-time, Lean, and the Toyota Production System in Chapter 16. However, there is significant overlap and interchangeability among those three concepts, so we have revised Chapter 16 to incorporate the three concepts into an overall concept of “Lean”. The chapter suggests that students view Lean as a comprehensive integrated operations strategy that sustains competitive advantage and results in increased returns to all stakeholders.

In addition, the following changes have been made for the third Canadian edition:

• New section on strategic planning, core competencies, and outsourcing added to Chapter 2.
• Coverage of agile and waterfall approaches to project management have been revised in Chapter 3.
• New section on supply chain management in Chapter 4.
• Added coverage of sustainability and life cycle assessment (LCA) to Chapter 5.
• New section on ISO 9000 International Quality Standards in Chapter 6.
• Coverage of bottleneck analysis in Supplement 7 has been completely revised.
• Added coverage of supplier certification, contracting, and centralized purchasing to Chapter 11.
• Added section on warehouse storage to Supplement 11.
• Coverage of economic order quantity enhanced with new section on period order quantity inChapter 14.
• Added coverage of finite and infinite loading to Chapter 15.
• Added coverage of Lean sustainability to Chapter 16.
• Added coverage of parallel redundancy to Chapter 17.
• New examples and case studies throughout the text.