PLANTWORKS A BOOK BY TREVOR CUSWORTH · PUBLISHING 2026
OPERATIONS · METHODOLOGY · MANUFACTURING

Your plant could produce
20 to 40 percent more.

You can't see why.

Your dashboards are green. Your financials are not. Where's Your Herbie? is the framework that reconciles them — built on forty-seven years of plant practice, the Theory of Constraints layered on top of the methodologies you already run, at AI scale.

Coming 2026
Where's Your Herbie? — book cover
Plantworks Press
What's inside

Twelve short chapters. Read it in an afternoon. Apply it for the rest of your career.

Why your highest-utilization station is rarely the constraint — and what to look for instead in the data and on the floor.

The single-day diagnostic that finds your real constraint — the walk-the-plant procedure refined across hundreds of operations.

How to convert recovered capacity into defensible cash — Zero Loss Analysis, first published in 2009, now run continuously rather than as a single engagement.

What the consulting industry won't tell you about why their last engagement didn't hold — and what makes a methodology actually durable.

How AI changes the cadence — and the rigor — of methodology work, without changing the methodology itself.

Where the Theory of Constraints sits relative to Lean, Six Sigma, TPM, and OEE — and why it's a layer on top of the methodologies you already run, not a replacement.

The full table of contents
01The Plant That Couldn't Make More Money
02The Question Efficiency Wasn't Built to Answer
03Goldratt in Modern Manufacturing
04The Five Focusing Steps, Translated
05The Seven Places Your Herbie Hides
06Why Your Herbie Keeps Moving
07The Walk-the-Plant Diagnostic
08Zero Loss Analysis
09The Measurements That Move Throughput
10The Cadence That Makes the Methodology Work
11The Practitioner in an AI Environment
12The Plant That Made More Money
About the author

Trevor Cusworth

Forty-seven years in industrial operations across discrete, hybrid, and continuous manufacturing. Refineries on the Gulf Coast and in the North Sea. Polymer trains, chemical works, pharmaceutical batch plants, food and beverage operations across five continents. Former CEO of Hagen & Company, where he pioneered Zero Loss Analysis, and former Director at Deloitte, where he published the methodology as Zero to Hero in 2009. Also: Imperial Chemical Industries, Imperial Oil, AspenTech, Invensys, Schneider Electric. Founder of Plantworks, based in Boulder, Colorado.

47 Years in operations
200+ Plants walked
5 Continents

Be on the list when the book ships.

The first chapter, launch-week pricing, and the occasional essay between now and launch.

Reserve your copy