The Practitioner's Guide to POLCA: The Production Control System for High-Mix, Low-Volume and Custom Products

This book is a comprehensive reference covering all aspects of implementing and using POLCA (Paired-cell Overlapping Loops of Cards with Authorization), a manufacturing control system that is an alternative to KANBAN for operations that do non-repetitive work. It has proven to be highly effective for high mix, low volume operations, and particularly those that deal with customized work.Growing out of the author’s creation of Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM), POLCA can be used in simple applications such as machine-to-machine or in more complex, larger loops covering an entire factory. The concept is scalable to the needs of the business leader who is seeking to reduce lead times and lower cost and investment.While POLCA has numerous benefits, two features really stand out:1) Communicating downstream problems to production cells so that they know to run the approved job for which there is available capacity downstream and 2) establishing maximums for Work in Process inventory levels to limit the use of key resources.This important work fills a need by providing extensive detailed descriptions of the benefits of POLCA to designing the system to getting underway and sustaining it as the company grows and changes. A particular strength is that it provides detailed and varied case studies from North America and Europe to illustrate how POLCA has been applied.While this book is quite thorough, it would benefit from the inclusion of anecdotal stories illustrating how POLCA makes jobs easier and more rewarding to first-line workers. This is very important for companies who struggle to attract and retain people.“The Practitioner’s Guide to POLCA” is a great resource for those who are coming to realize the power of time-based operations as well as for experienced leaders looking to expand their knowledge of lead time reduction strategies.

If you want to get to work using the POLCA system, this is definitely the book to get you started. The book is easy to read and thanks to the book’s structure, one can easily access the parts one needs.For those who are unfamiliar with POLCA, this book is the ideal introduction guide. The principles of the system are explained in a clear manner and in part 3, many practical and relevant examples are given. For further in-depth and background information the book conveniently refers to the appendices or the example cases. This keeps the book on topic and to the point.The book provides a systematic guide to implement POLCA. The amount of specific information and practical applicability left me pleasantly surprised. Difficulties and pitfalls are mentioned, but also examples of practical solutions are given.My compliments to the author.This book rightfully bears the title “Practitioner's Guide to POLCA” and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in exploring whether POLCA would apply to their situation and to everyone planning on giving POLCA a go.Mike KiensPartner and Senior Operations ConsultantKienologic B.V.The Netherlands

That's a very good reading for people looking for information about how to manage the crazyness of having a custom production factory.There's light at the end of the tunel!!!Thank you Rajan!!!

Great tool! Implementing in production as we speak!

Excellent for it's info and case studies