Being able to increase productivity and revenues has always been the greatest challenge of any manager, and the manager of RL Wolfe, a plastic pipe manufacturer, was not an exception. Because of the low-efficiency percentage RL Wolfe had in comparison to their its competitors, John Amasi, director of Production and Engineering , had no other choice then came up with a new way of improving RL Wolfe production methods. 1) Compare and contrast the new plant to the old in terms of work design. Identify and rank order the most challenging problems and describe possible solutions. John Amasi attempteds to implement self-directed teams in order to increase their productivity. Being able to make their own decisions would reduced the time of production time significantly. But such improvement did not come easy, many impasses showed in his way because of the differences between the way things were made and the way Amasi wanted to be. The decision making was one the first differences to face, in order to fulfil this task, employees were empowered by the managers in order to be able to make daily decisions, whichthat were usually made by the headquarters, that being done, a good alternative for improving this process would make a retroactive way of teaching, employees with seniority should eventually start teaching new recruiters and repeat the cycle. The second problem they face was the develop of job assignments, for this matter, training was also the obvious and more accurate
The Rose Company is building a new plant to reduce cost, improve the quality of products, and maintain competitive leadership by gaining a slight production advantage. The main obstacles to be overcome are the commissioning of a new plant, new methods and process, and administrative reporting issues. As the newly hired General Plant Manager, I plan to resolve these issues by insisting that all plant communications flow through me, instituting training for plant personnel and setting operational expectations.
4. Location of the new plant: 0 points. Here we would have to strongly consider if we could relocate the plant given that we could hire new workforce under completely new agreements. The biggest disadvantage that we have currently is that the workers are being overpaid, and reducing their salary would affect their
Innovation – HD invested in process improvements in 1992. One option for future expansion is to look into continuous improvement and optimization of existing facilities to maximize output.
MTC initially needed to obtain substantial investment capital due to two main factors: a research-heavy industry, and the need to create most of the markets for its products. Although the founders' goal was to become a major manufacturing company, they did estimate that the company would need $50 million in capital before it would become self-sufficient. Their initial financing model was to first recruit a superior technical team, use that to attract additional equity investment and development funding from interested corporations, and then develop manufacturing capabilities. Commercial sales began 2.5 years after inception, and MTC is nearing the break-even point in 1990.
1) Prepare the manufacturing staff’s calculations for the three alternatives (please refer to the attachments):
DO YOU AGREE WITH MR. WILSON 'S ESTIMATE OF THE COMPANY 'S LOAN REQUIREMENTS? HOW MUCH WILL HE NEED TO FINANCE THE EXPECTED EXPANSION IN SALES TO $ 5.5 MILLION IN 2006 AND TO TAKE ALL TRADE DISCOUNTS?
Putting yourself in the shoes of the managers or engineers in the case (Ron Dittemore, Linda Ham, Don McCormack, Rodney Rocha, Pamela Madera, Calvin Schomburg), consider the following questions?
Alex comes up with the consensus that the “Goal” of his business and many others is to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment and their cash flow at the plant. This basically means to make money. These three measurements can be achieved by looking closer into his second set of measurements. Alex specifically must find a way to increase throughput while at the same time decreasing it inventory and operational expenses. All three of these measurements must be cautiously monitored since they all rely on each other to be obtained in balance. Factors that cause throughput, inventory, and operational expenses to become unbalanced are excess manpower and balance capacity of the demand of resources in the market.
In order to meet customer demands for higher product quality, to comply with federally-mandated environmental regulations, and to reduce production costs, HCC must spend $2,000,000 within the next three years to upgrade equipment. The upgrade is expected to result in production efficiencies that will lower material and labor costs by reducing defective products, process waste, in-process inventory, and production man-hours through simplified work processes. It has been over a decade since significant modifications were made to the production facilities. Those changes were mostly technical in nature and did not substantially alter work processes or reduce overall employment. The average productivity gain in the industry for the past five years has been 3% per year. Financing for the loan to purchase the equipment
Cost and productivity leadership. By resolving the issue of high foremen turnover, the Lima plant can consolidate its position as the top's Treadway plant in productivity, quality, and lowest cost producer.
The Goal is a book that has an enormous provision on enhancement in management. It will undoubtedly encourage the Total Quality Management expressions when trying to build up and advance their production. In the book Alex Rogo the is manager of a manufacturing plant who is failing and receives a proposition from Mr. Peach, the Division Vice President that his plant will shut down in three months if Mr. Rogo is unable to increase production and decrease cost. Mr. Peaches visit to the plant made Mr. Rogo aware that his plant was not operating to the best of its ability. Rogo struggled with how to show significant improvement in his plant in three short months, until he remembered the conversation he had at the airport with Jonah who works as
Littlefield Technologies (LT) has developed another DSS product. The new product is manufactured using the same process as the product in the assignment “Capacity Management at Littlefield Technologies” — neither the process sequence nor the process time distributions at each tool have changed. The LT factory began production by investing most of its cash into capacity and inventory. Specifically, on day 0, the factory began operations with three stuffers, two testers, and one tuner, and a raw materials inventory of 9600 kits. This left the factory with zero cash on hand. Customer demand
Eliyahu M Goldratt purpose of writing this book is to introduce individuals to how to manage and measure effectively. Goldratt illustrates how the accounting cost figures and productivity per machine can actually be problematic for it misleads individuals into thinking they’re achieving the goal. Rather all attention should be focused on strategy planning and managing the bottlenecks because they are the true driving metric of production. One major takeaway message from this novel is that there is always room for improvement. This philosophy of ongoing improvement originated in a Toyotas production system and is better know as the Kaizen theory. The Novel, stresses the Kaizen theory, which starts with an indication, then an in-depth analysis, followed by a diagnosis, eventually arrive ate a hypothesis and ending with
First, Ashley should collect data or information about employee turnover and the training demand from foremen and supervisors. On the one hand, through the information, Ashley should know how many foremen are from internal promotions, external hire or transfers and then she can make sure which source is the most appropriate. On the other hand, through the data, Ashley also can understand the training needs of employee and then she can create an appropriate organized training program.
Benson Metals, a medium-sized maker of specialty steel products, has traditionally used a craftsliketechnology to produce a variety of metals. In terms of Perrow’s model of technology, task variety andtask analyzability are low, as there is still guesswork, skill, and even some “black magic” inmanufacturing products. Benson also produces metals in very small quantities—pounds not tons—so thatin terms of Woodward’s model it is small batch, and the skills and knowledge of production people aremore important than machines in getting the job done—task complexity is low.Recently, the company has moved