Introduction to The Blitz Company

1. Mr. Alfred Jodal, President of the company believes that the company is more adept than its competitors in anticipating and resolving the problem inherent in new designs. 2. The Blitz Company has specialized in making circuit boards for experimental devices and production runs. 3. Companys month on month profit is steadily increasing and in September the total profit is $15,438 which is 46.5% of the total sales. Shows the sound financial performance of the company. 4. Mr. Jodal and Mr. Krebs, the firms design engineer, have invented several of the companys processing methods and have patented applications and processes. 5. The company has the policy of delivering orders of less than 1000 circuit boards within three weeks and any order of above 1000 in five weeks period from the day of acceptance of the bid. 6. The company is into consulting for the manufacturing of circuit boards also. They give advice to the companies on how can they better improve their technological processes and hence they develop the circuit boards accordingly. 7. The manufactured circuit boards are then installed in the assembly in final products like two way radios, radar etc.

First Hand Analysis of The Blitz Company

The Blitz Company is a job shop if we consider the high number of orders which have a requirement of less than 1000 circuit boards. But the company has also made efforts to procure few bulk orders which have a requirement of more than 1000 circuit boards to be manufactured. Thus, the operation of Blitz Company lies somewhere between the Job shop and a batch processing company. Furthermore, the problem presented in the case of changing requirements and slowdown of the processing cycle is not a problem in the first place. This is because Blitz is expected to manufacture customized circuit boards which are to be used in various experimental equipments under work in the R&D department of the customer company. The primary requirement of these experimental devices company is that they need highly customized products in a quick time. Thus, in whole Blitz caters to a group of R&D companies which require them to deliver high quality products in low time. Moreover, the QCDF analysis of Blitz looks as follows: Quality: R&D Companies expect Blitz to deliver high quality circuit boards for experimental purposes. Cost: Experimental companies are ready to shelve out higher amount of money for the customized boards they order.

Delivery: Customer companies expect delivery based on both promptness and reliability. Functionality: The firms ordering the circuit boards from Blitz expect the boards to deliver high functionality as they have envisaged while ordering the product.

Financial Performance

Manufacturing Performance

May-July

The above diagram shows the situation that Blitz finds itself in. Initially when the company started they were manufacturing and delivering circuit boards of high quality. Furthermore, being a new company their revenues were very low. As the company grew old it managed to increase its revenues because of the high quality of products but it started compromising on its quality and this is evident by the 9% return (As per Exhibit 7) of the circuit boards that were rejected because of non-conformance to the expected quality. The crossover zone in the above graph indicates the period between May-July where the focus of the firm started shifting from manufacturing quality customized products to bulk orders thereby looking to improve their bottom-line. This is also evident from the fact that there was an almost 100% increase in net sales for month of August over its previous month.

Major Problems in the daily operation of Blitz:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Operator scheduling (Job Rotation ) is haphazard. Process Development is a problem. The cross movement between different stages. The layout of the plant. Quality Control: As the process proceeds the products are not inspected for deviations if any. 6. 20 orders out of 60 (33%) are changing. (As per Exhibit 5)

THE PROCESS FLOW DIAGRAM

(All Calculations for distances have been done on the basis of Exhibit 6 which provides the layout details of the shop floor)
SHEAR: CUTTING AND PLACEMENT OF LOCATIONAL HOLES IN THE PANELS (1)

90.42 FEET

IMAGE TRANSFER AND PLATING AND ETCHING (2), (3), (4), (5)

FOR CUTTING PANELS INTO CIRCUIT BOARDS

34.93 FEET 14.52 FEET

BENCH PRESS (2 HOLES IN EACH CIRCUIT BOARD)

14.96 FEET

DESIRED SHAPING ON PUNCH PRESS OR ROUTING MACHINE

BAND SAW FOR FIXTURES

14.96 FEET
100 HOLES IN EACH CIRCUIT BOARD USING BENCH DRILL/GREEN PANTOGRAPHIC PRESS

17.7 FEET
EYELET AND TERMINAL PAINTING OF EPOXY RESIN (REQUIRED FOR SOME BOARDS)

12.9 FEET

FINAL INSPECTION

An Analysis of the Process Flow as depicted above:

The above diagram shows the various processes that a particular order may route through. Supplementing the process flows are the distances given in feet that an employee would need to move each time he moves from one process to another. Thus, it effectively reflects the time that a worker wastes in movement during manufacturing. For ex. A worker moves a distance of 90.4 feet after completing the process of shear and then moving to image transfer thus spending an average time of half a minute while moving once between the two processes. This process is repeated n number of times and thus it results in substantial wastage of workers time. Therefore, to etch 5740 circuits the total time a worker will waste= .5*5740/60 hrs = 48 hours or 2 days. The time calculations are also applicable for the movement between other processes. Thus, the cross movement and the layout between the different stages emerges to be one of the major problems.

Exhibit 3: The Analysis and work on the numbers of Setup and Run time.
Note: There are few mistakes we found in the calculation of total number of orders and circuit boards. The mistake is that the total numbers of circuit boards or orders have been calculated by summing up the numbers of boards used in each process. But this is not the case, since each circuit board which goes through the initial processes of inspect and shear will also go through several other processes. Thus we cannot sum all the circuit boards to arrive at a total figure. Corroborated from Exhibit 5 which shows the total number of orders and circuit board in processing in the month of September. Setup Time: The total setup time is worked out by multiplying the individual setup times of each operation with the number of orders. Ex. The total setup time in photography is calculated by multiplying the setup time of 29 minutes with the number of orders that is 59 which equals 1710. Run Time: The total run time is calculated with respect to the total number of circuits. However, care would have to be taken whether the run time given is for a panel or for a circuit board. Ex. KPR has a run time of 10 minutes for a panel. Therefore, for each circuit board the time will be 1.25 minutes considering there are 8 circuit boards in each panel. Thus the total run time for KPR is 1.25*5740=7200 minutes. Our approach in determining the total number of circuit boards and their relevant average time is that we have taken the weighted average of all the processes and their time which have the highest number of circuit boards (Photograph, Inspect & Shear, Drill, KPR, Touch, Plate , Etch, Drill, Shear, Inspect & pack). Doing this we will be able to determine the average time in which a particular circuit board will be made. Average Run Time/ Circuit Board= Run time of (Photograph + Inspect & Shear + Drill +KPR+ +Touch+Plate+Etch+Shear+Drill + Inspect& Pack)

= .0625+.0626+1.25+.375+.625+.5+.5+.5+1+1.5) =6 minutes. We add one more minute considering the Drilling hole time and other process that have not been taken into account. Total Average Run Time/Circuit Board=7 minutes. Similarly we calculated the total Setup time by considering the relevant time of the processes that use maximum number of orders. Total Average Setup Time= 29+20+10+1+10+10+10+10+10+10=120 minutes. We add 30 more minutes to the setup time considering the time for the processes we have not considered. Total Average Set up time /order=150 minutes.

Exhibit 5: Analysis of the total Short (Three weeks delivery) and Long time (5 weeks Delivery) order
According to the company policy designed by Mr. Jodal and Mr. Krebs, they had put static delivery times for the orders they receive,. If an order is less than 1000 circuit boards then the order will be delivered in three weeks time and if the order is for more than 1000 circuit boards then it will be delivered in 5 weeks time. Now looking at exhibit 5 we find that 57 of the total 60 orders have a requirement of less than 1000 circuit boards to be manufactured. The total numbers of circuit boards for these 57 orders are 2689 which will have to be delivered in three weeks. Thus, we can calculate the total time that these orders will take by multiplying the total number of orders with the average setup time calculated above. Total Setup Time for 57 orders to be delivered in three weeks= (57*150)/60 =142.5 hours Total Run time for 2689 circuit boards to be delivered in three weeks= (2689*7)/60 =313 hours Thus total time required for manufacturing three week orders = Setup time + Run time =313+142.5~ 450 hours **. ** The numbers have been calculated considering that all the orders have arrived on the first day, but the time of 450 hours should be distributed over entire period of the month.

Total time available in three weeks= 3*7*X X= number of hours that labor needs to work. If the orders have to be delivered on time then x=21.4 hours, i.e. labors need to put in 21 hours of work each day if the order has to be manufactured and delivered on time. Similarly, the total setup time for 3 orders which are to be delivered in 5 weeks can be calculated: Total Set up time for 3, 5 week order= 3*150=7.5 hours Total Run time for 3050 circuit boards to be delivered in 5 weeks= 3050*7= 355 hours Total time required for manufacturing 5 week orders=355+7.5= 362.5 hours Total time available in five weeks=5*7*X If the orders have to be delivered on time then x=10.4 hours, i.e. labors need to put in 10 hours of work each day if the order has to be manufactured and delivered on time.

Recommendation
Thus, we see that the five week orders do not form a part of the problem. Therefore, if the company segregates the department for three week and five week orders then the process becomes more streamlined and the five weeks order will be delivered in time. Moreover, if the processes are separated then the five week order will not interfere with those of three week and rush orders and hence the efficiency of the processes can be improved.

Rotation of People from Job to Job:

Its been mentioned in the case that people were shifted from one job to another in order to provide more resources to the emerging bottleneck in the processes. For ex the plater and the etched used to exchange job between themselves but if we refer to Exhibit 3 then we will find that both the etching and plating processes were performed on most of the circuit boards that are under manufacturing circulation. Thus it does not make much sense to shift the people within these highly occupied jobs. Instead they can be supplemented with workforce from other areas such as drilling or epoxy painting where the work load is much less.