The content of the books have been many years in the making.
My objective has been to share my three decades of hands-on experience in just-in-time apparel and footwear manufacturing and my knowledge about the best approaches and techniques for achieving sustained excellence in the manufacturing sector. At the start of my career, I was influenced by Frederick Winslow Taylor who is known as the father of scientific management. I followed his steps, observing apparel / footwear (AF) manufacturing practices and related work behavior and comparing them to international business trends and best practices in other sectors.
I spent enormous energy researching and analyzing what drives leading manufacturing businesses and why the AF industry is, for the most part, unable to achieve the same world-class excellence. It became my mission to bring the industry into the same realm by developing talented professionals to spread the culture of continuous improvement throughout the world’s garment factories. Unfortunately things haven’t gone smoothly. Many of the newly trained professionals that I´ve worked with throughout the years were looking for individual career opportunities, not for driving change throughout the sector. This was understandable given the lack of effective leadership and management support towards real change.
I became extremely frustrated as my quest for a revolution in the apparel and footwear sectors stalled. That is the reason behind the books – to reach a large number of leaders who are interested in raising the industry’s standards to become a world-class manufacturing platform. Over the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of articles, workshops and webinars promoting continuous improvement as the means for the survival of the AF sectors. Unfortunately they are all limited to the application of the Toyota Production System (TPS) whose tools and techniques were originally designed for the automobile industry. These need to be redesigned and expanded specifically for the apparel and footwear industry in order to achieve greater results.
I always ask myself how is it possible that leaders in factories have not yet understood these basic misconceptions. Over and over I see senior management just focusing on increasing sales rather than making their operations truly better. This begins with a comprehensive understanding of how to measure and evaluate financial performance, to know where the factory is losing money and how to reduce the loss. Otherwise no amount of increased orders will improve their bottom line. At a time when the entire industry worldwide is facing crisis, surely this is the most important moment to dig deeper into what creates real excellence and how to sustain it. It doesn’t matter how much investment is thrown at improvement.
New technology or new capacity of itself will not save a company if the company is plagued with misdirected strategy and priorities, weak management, and a misguided workforce employing poor work behavior and lacking standards. Every area in the organization needs to be worked on simultaneously if true improvement is to be achieved. This can only happen if the leaders possess in-depth knowledge of the principles of world-class manufacturing. That is the goal of the books – to guide those who want to really make a difference and lead the revolution which has been so long in coming. I urge every manufacturing leader to go through my books clearly understand the steps that it takes to plan, build and maintain a solid foundation in this new era of manufacturing.
- Dr. Charles Dagher
