Proceedings Of 21st International Symposium Of Industrial Robots edited by Thomas Lund IFS Publications, Bedford, UK, 10 1990, 444 pages no index (£59.00)

IMPLEMENTING OPTIMISED PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY: (IMPLEMENTING OPT) by Kevin Johnson, IFS Publications Ltd, Bedford, UK, 1990, 120 pages, no index (£85.00). These two companion volumes follow the very successful A4 format adopted by IFS Publications for their 'managerial report' type books. My only concern is that this time IFS have gone to single sided printing on each sheet. Being charitable, I guess that the blank sides have been introduced to satisfy requests from buyers of other IFS managerial books for a scribble pad. It is unfortunate that both books contain an excessive amount of sales pitch for the company marketing the OPT software. This is especially so in 'Optimised Production Technology', where I sometimes found myself wondering if I was reading sales literature rather than supposedly unbiased relevations of a novel production control technique. From the contents of both books it would appear that OPT has a lot to offer as a complementary system to other computer based production control systems rather than being a superior alternative. In some areas I was troubled that the authors themselves seemed to preface many of the claimed advantages of OPT with disclaimer statements. On the other hand, it was reassuring that they did not claim that OPT would solve all of the problems encountered within manufacturing industry. Also many of the thoughts and philosophies (in both volumes) that were directly attributed to the usage of OPT were refreshing and/or novel, thereby giving a lot of assurance for the validity of OPT. The first volume contains a number of cases studies that detail users' experience of OPT 'warts and all'. This again gave me some confidence in the OPT system that had been undermined by other parts of both books, when I found myself wondering what was so different about OPT versus other production control systems, and why would I purchase a 'unique' package. In the end I came to the opinion that OPT has a lot to offer. Therefore I would recommend that these two books for all that one needs to know about the theory (but less than is desirable about the implementation) of using Optimised Production Technology.