case

22 Tyndall Furniture
Company (C)

The proposal for the new shopfloor control system has been in your hands for a week
now, and I would like to schedule a meeting to discuss it tomorrow morning at nine. We
have all had high hopes that this would help us to improve delivery performance and
productivity. Now is the time to review it and see if we feel this is the system for us.

Don Rutkowski was just concluding a meeting with his plant managers and key
staff people. A great deal of work had gone into the preparation of this proposal and
management was enthusiastic about it.

Company Background
Established in 1898 by Henry H. Tyndall, the company remained a family-owned
business until 1963, when it was bought by a large conglomerate, Berkron Indus-
tries Inc. The Tyndall Furniture Company had grown conservatively in its produc-
tion of dining-room and bedroom furniture in primarily Early American designs.
The company wanted to grow at a faster rate to take advantage of some market
opportunities and to increase its profitability, which was trailing most of the
industry. One of the expansion moves currently underway involved the acquisition
of a nearby plant producing fully upholstered furniture, which is a new product
category to Tyndall. Adding fully upholstered furniture to its line would open new
opportunities in living-room furniture while increasing the company’s appeal to
dealers as a full-product-line supplier.

Marketing and Product Strategy

‘Sales in our market segments have been shifting somewhat over the past several
years. We intend to double our in-store galleries while continuing our retreat from
the mom and pop segment’, stated Greg Procter.

This case was prepared by Professors W. L. Berry (Ohio State University), T. J. Hill (University of Oxford), J. E. Klomp-
maker (University of North Carolina) and W. G. Morrissey (North Carolina State University) as a basis for class discussion
rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. © Professor W. L. Berry,
Professor J. E. Klompmaker, Professor W. G. Morrissey or AMD Publishing (UK). Inquiries in the USA to Zip Publishing,
1634 N. High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43201.

554

T. Hill, Manufacturing Strategy

© Terry Hill 2000
T Y N D A L L F U R N I T U R E C O M PA N Y ( C ) 555

The mass merchandiser is obviously an important customer, but we do not want to

become too dependent on a single customer, so we have tended to limit our sales with
that customer. At the same time we need to stay sensitive to developments in our other
market segments and remain flexible enough to respond to these changes while
achieving a 10 per cent annual growth rate in total sales.
Our past product strategy has been part of our current problem in achieving more
growth. We have been short of dining room chair capacity while having some surplus
case capacity. This recently prompted us to bring out more bedroom groups, taking
advantage of the available case capacity. It is nearly impossible to closely control our
sales in each category, and it is apparent that at some point we will have to increase our
production capacity in order to service our customers. In the meantime, we have kept
our delivery commitments to key dealers by giving them first priority on available-to-
ship products. [See Exhibit 10 in Case 21 for a review of the order winners in the
company’s different markets.]

Manufacturing
The company has a number of plants in the Grand Rapids area. The component
plant, which is some distance outside Grand Rapids, includes the dry kilns that take
green lumber and dry it before processing. The rough mill removes all defects from
the lumber to produce ‘blanks’, which then are processed into finished parts in the
machining and sanding departments of the component plant. Some blanks are
obtained from outside suppliers. The component plant supplies parts to the case
plant. It is scheduled to start supplying parts to the case plant and to the fully uphol-
stered plant in the near future. The chair plant machines all its own parts on sepa-
rate facilities.
Don Rutkowski, in discussing the machining of fully upholstered parts, explained:

There is sufficient kiln capacity. Our equipment and people are more than adequate to
machine these parts. Fully upholstered parts are made from lower-grade lumber, require
less machining, and are not sanded so they will not materially add to our work load. The
dowel joints used in upholstered furniture construction do not require the more complex
machining of the products in our current product line. The typical upholstery plant has
rather rudimentary equipment compared to the sophisticated machinery we have so we
should have no trouble.

The plants primarily work on a single, eight-hour shift, with overtime as

required. At certain times in the year the plants do work a second shift. However,
within the furniture industry there is a reluctance to work a double shift because of
quality and supervision problems, a view which has been substantiated over time.
‘The relatively long life cycle for our typical products and the stability of our
product designs generate greater total volumes over the life of a product and
underpin our process improvement strategy. However, we are making an increas-
ingly wide range of products’, Don Rutkowski commented, ‘and the range of