Eastern Gear
Eastern Gear, Inc. Is a manufacturer of custom-made gears located in Philadelphia and founded by Roger Rhodes. This company is having troubles shipping its orders on time due to large orders, the waste of movement taking the gears throughout the operations, changes requested by the customer after the order has been placed, no workflow is utilized and poor quality.
The company has a total workforce of 50 employees, who are highly skilled or semiskilled; this proves that the company can make a high quality product and at a rapid flow if the system and job shop layout is placed the right way. This will get rid of the problem of being behind of schedule and therefore the rush orders. It also has been confirmed that 75 percent of the cases, the returned orders have failed to undergo one or more operations or the operations have been improperly done. If Sam Bartholomew (engineer) and Joe Irvine (foreman) re-balance the line and locate the drilling area besides milling machines and follow the same process with the remaining operations this will create a faster and more efficient work area, and also it would be easier to supervise the product while it runs smoothly through the line instead of jumping from one operation to the other.
In order to speed the process there has to be a workflow process for the orders to be shipped on time, this can be as simple as using FIFO (First In, First Out), if a short order is made and after that one there is a large order requesting 100 gears then there would be no problem to speed the process. But I suppose one of the main issues that provokes the bottlenecks from time to time is that this company is trying to be a balanced company and because they are trying to be a balanced company they have no buffers or extra parts when an order is placed and it is critical to have extra raw material in order to keep the speed on the line. Also there has to be a policy to extra charge the customer whenever they request
The company has a total workforce of 50 employees, who are highly skilled or semiskilled; this proves that the company can make a high quality product and at a rapid flow if the system and job shop layout is placed the right way. This will get rid of the problem of being behind of schedule and therefore the rush orders. It also has been confirmed that 75 percent of the cases, the returned orders have failed to undergo one or more operations or the operations have been improperly done. If Sam Bartholomew (engineer) and Joe Irvine (foreman) re-balance the line and locate the drilling area besides milling machines and follow the same process with the remaining operations this will create a faster and more efficient work area, and also it would be easier to supervise the product while it runs smoothly through the line instead of jumping from one operation to the other.
In order to speed the process there has to be a workflow process for the orders to be shipped on time, this can be as simple as using FIFO (First In, First Out), if a short order is made and after that one there is a large order requesting 100 gears then there would be no problem to speed the process. But I suppose one of the main issues that provokes the bottlenecks from time to time is that this company is trying to be a balanced company and because they are trying to be a balanced company they have no buffers or extra parts when an order is placed and it is critical to have extra raw material in order to keep the speed on the line. Also there has to be a policy to extra charge the customer whenever they request