Study Eastern Gear, Inc.: Job Shop Inc. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a be n
ID: 400312 • Letter: S
Question
Study Eastern Gear, Inc.: Job Shop Inc. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a be necessa Easteter of custom-made gears ranging in weight materials or m@n ew ounces to over 50 pounds. The gears are er's prints suoorder made of different requi d brass alloys have been used as raw materials. information is needed. See Exhibit ,s-ca 7.akt»:n and wait for new raw to be clarified. The custom- do not always con- ny es required during machining. ontacted directly when the metals, depending on the customer's s. Over the past year, 40 different types of As a result, the custarners tain the tolerance 1 for details. Gear sells its products primarily to engineer production supervisor, Joe In After the order is received, one copy is sent to the Irvine, and the second copy ng research and development laboratories or very small is sent to Sam Smith, the controller. Upon receipt of the manufacturers. As a result, the nitsiber orders is small; rarely is exactly the y of gears in most customer's order, Smith places a purchase order for the same Gear ordered raw materials required. These materials often take from n of ciser sizes for one to two weeks to arrive, depending on the supplier than once. The distribution of ordered for March 2016 is shown in Exh 2 Recently, the presigent osterr Guas decided to ond the type of material ordered. After receiving the customer order, the supervisor accept a few larger ordeis fos 1 ears or more. reviews the order and places it on file until the raw mate- Ailthough lower plices wera acnsplot un these ordersrial arrives. The customer order is then routed through they helped pay the overherd F was found that the the shop along with the materials. In the past, the pro- large orders caused many of the smali orders to wait for duction process for most gears has taken about two a long time before being processed. As a result, some weeks after receipt of raw materials. Recently this pro- deliveries of small orders were lste. duction time has increased to four weeks. Irvine expressed concern about the bottlenecks that appear in the production process. One week the bottle- ORDER ENTRY When a customer wishes in o de e gear, the order is taken by James Lord, se'2s manager and marketing vice neck may be in one machine center it is in another. These bottlenecks make it difficult to get the orders out on time. The custuiner speclies the type of gear desired by submitting asiLeprint or sketch. The quantity of gears required and the type of material are also spec- fied by the customer. On occasion, the customer's engi- neer will call up after the order has been placed and request a change in the design. In these cases, it may EXHIBIT 2 Sales, March 2016. Total $ Value Order Size Number of Ordersof Orders EXHIBIT 1 Raw materials. 2015 Usage Type of Material All Others $522 was prepared as a basis for class discussion, not to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrativeExplanation / Answer
1. Following are the major problems being faced by the eastern gear--------firstly the large order are being delaying many of the smaller order as no specific work centers and that made large orders more of a prefrence. its hard to get orders set. eastern geal keep no raw material inventory on hand. there are bottleneck in the production process. unproductive ways to rush orders, one person carry the order through the factory. they are geeting too many employees too fast and this is increasing a lot of their costs. poor quality control check, insufficent factory layout.
2. Following are the actions taken by the Rhodes taken to solve his problem-----------------
1. Keep raw material on hand and typical metal used.
2. Move towards assembel to order.
3. Improve throughput ratio.
4. Rather than having station-make multiple assembly line.
5. Bottleneck are fixed through layout.
6. leave one assembly line for rush order.
7. Implement total quality management, quality control checks throughoout assembly line.
3. Following are the steps which shows that this case be related to operational strategy and process design--------------
1. packaging product and ancillary services such as reduced costs for bulk buying , offering installation and services,offering extended warrenty etc.
2. continually monitoring of products for small improvement such as geeting feedback from customer on the usage what problems they encounter during the usage what to improve after a period of using.
3. marketing implementation tactics to attract customers and reduce the changing order during process that is standarize but more option of attractive ,reliable and useful gear to choose and satisfying customer needs such as protocol of customization before the process of the product.
4. change the machines or upgrading them. 90% of bottleneck is due to the machine. they may be obsolate and not friendly user and a worst case scenario may need overhaul which is more expensive then buying better technology machines and platform for expediting the production process for better quality products.
5. Increasing on better quality and more option raw material where it can be componenet of the gear for future expansion to make it easier to use the same parts across different model and brands, thereby saving time on design and testing ,and saving money on manufacturing and quality improvement. with these , customer gear should set a research and development department to survey and search various trustable suppliers for cheaper and trustworthy raw material.