Business Law Case Study: Diecraft Australia

ASIAN CASE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOL. 8, ISSUE 2, 187– 213 (2004)

ACRJ
Diecraft Australia
This case was prepared by Associate Professor Kannan Sethuraman and Visiting Professor Devanath Tirupati of the Melbourne Business School as a basis for classroom discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative or business situation. Please address all correspondence to: Associate Professor Kannan Sethuraman, Melbourne Business School, Carlton, Australia, Vic 3053. E-mail:[e-mail]

On the morning of May 15, 2002 Mark Jackson, General Manager of Diecraft, arrived at the premises of his firm in Reservoir, a northern suburb of Melbourne, at 6.30 am. There were several pressing matters that
The conversions represented requests for alterations to old moulds that had been in the field for some time. Diecraft had an annual capacity to manufacture 130–150 moulds, which included 20–30 conversions. A new mould request was further classified as either a standard or non-standard request based on the similarities that the request shared with earlier jobs done by Diecraft. The typical life of a mould was dependent on the type of steel that was used to make the mould and its usage frequency. Soft steel moulds were less expensive, easier and faster to make. However, they had a shorter life in terms of the number of cycles of use, and their quality typically eroded quickly towards the end of their lives. On the contrary, hardened steel moulds were more expensive but were capable of delivering more than a million cycles with minimal maintenance. The price of a mould depended upon the material choice, complexity of the mould, the number of cavities per mould (typically the number ranged from 2 to 8 per mould), and other aesthetic requirements that mandated more sophisticated ejector mechanisms. ORDER PROCESSING Most of the orders that Diecraft was processing were obtained through a bidding process. Typically, the process began with a request for quote (RFQ) from a purchasing department of a Tupperware region. The customer’s purchasing department requested Diecraft and other competitors
The programmable controller in these machines controls the machine tool and dictates the precise sequence off operations, the position of cutters etc. The automatic features of these machines facilitate an operator to run more than one machine at a time.
3Computer-Numerically-Controlled

Unigraphics allows us to save time in preparing for production since it permits the mould design to automatically update itself should the master part model be altered. The deployment of this specialist mould tool design software has provided us with considerable productivity improvements as the software understands how components of a mould fit together and facilitates the design process through appropriate suggestions with respect to component selection based on past designs.