A Manufacturing Situation A manufacturing facility produces an end-product X, which is an assembly of components 1, 2 and 3 produced in turn from raw materials

RM1, RM2 and RM3 respectively. The shop comprises of the following processes: Fabrication (A), Robot Welding (B), Manual Assembly (C), Punch Press (D), and Inspection (I). The routing of components and the end product on the shop is as follows: Component #1: Fabrication (A) - Assembly (C) Component #2: Fabrication (A) - Welding (B) - Assembly (C) Component #3: Press (D) - Assembly (C) End Product X: Final Inspection (I) Despatch The Bill of Material for the product and the Routing of the components/ assembly are given in the figures below:

Figure 1 Some Facts Regarding the Shops Operation

Figure 2

There are three variants of the end product (small, medium, large); these variants use the same facilities with the same precedence relationship; Orders arrive for different combinations of small, medium and large; Process times at station B is twice that of A, C and D; Reject rates at stations A, B, C, D and I are 10%, 5%, 5%, 0% and 0% respectively; The machine at station A is most efficient on the shop - low cost, high output rate; it replaced several slower machines which needed more people; The shops efficacy is measured in terms of utilization of each station (or the machine).

The company wanted to get an external opinion on their operations. It was felt that operations had problems which their employees were not able to see. So they hired a summer trainee to observe their operations for a month and then make a report. Among other observations made by the trainee, there was section in the report which highlighted the most frequently occurring incidents on the shop floor. Some of these observations were as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Orders were piled up. Machines were available but parts not available. Parts were available but workers were not available. Parts and workers were available but the machine was down (waiting for repair or under repair) Large batches were being run at initial stations. Sometimes the bottleneck would move even when order profile was not changing significantly. There was a lot of WIP on the shop floor and station targets were being achieved, yet the orders were getting delayed.

Before the firm could find solutions to the above observations, they wanted to understand the causes of these occurrences.