The Practitioner's Guide to POLCA

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to many people who helped transform POLCA from a theoretical concept to a practical working system with proven results. In 1998, when I first described the complete concept of POLCA in a chapter in my book, Quick Response Manufacturing, it was an idea based purely on my intuition about manufacturing systems. I had devised the details of the system using thought experiments based on my knowledge of the dynamics of interconnected systems combined with my experiences about the behavior of people in production environments. Although I managed to put together a lot of details on the design of POLCA—the chapter consisted of over 40 pages—there had been no practical trials of this system at that point. Thus, it required ...