Our economy and future way of life depend on how well American manufacturing managers adapt to the dynamic, globally competitive landscape and evolve their firms to keep pace. A major challenge is how to structure the firm’s environment so that it attains the speed and low cost of high-volume flow lines while retaining the flexibility and customization potential of a low-volume job shop. Written for both engineering and management students, the authors demonstrate the effectiveness of a rule-based and data driven approach to operations planning and control. They advance an organized framework from which to evaluate management practices and develop useful intuition about manufacturing systems.