Case Overview: Eastern Gear

 custom made gears with high level of variety and customer based specifications

 gears made of different metals as raw materials

 usually takes small orders and orders are rarely identical

 large orders being taken recently causing small orders to wait for processing and

resulting in bottleneck (late delivery of small orders)

 Workflow: :

order taken by sales manager & marketing vice president (type & quantity of gear and

type of materials specified by customers)  [production supervisor (reviews orders and

places it on file) + controller (places purchase order for raw materials)] order routed

through the shop with the raw materials (4 weeks)

 Job shop process having a process layout (one work centre having set of similar tools)

 Typical order processing method:

Milling work center (teeth cut into edges of the gear based on the customers’

demands)Drilling work center (one or more holes drilled in the gear)Grinding center

(finish put on the teeth and surface of the gears)Heat-treating center (as per

requirement) InspectionShipment

 High time spent by the orders in the waiting line and low time in processing resulting in

longer period to come out of the shop

 The combined processing of small and large orders and absence of different workflow for

different sized orders resulting in the lack of priority in completion of small orders

 Opportunity to maximize profit by $0.5 Million by minimizing the lead time

 New role of an expediter introduced to solve the lead time problems

 Lower rate of return caused by the poor quality of products which is mostly the outcome

of the failure to perform the exact operational methods

 Rush hour timelines:

 Raw materials rush-ordered and received in one3 day

 Order rushed through the production in four days