Quality Parts Company
Admin Note: We also have an excel file related to this solution. Premium members can contact us to get the excel file free of cost.
Questions
1. Which of the changes being considered by the manager of Quality Parts Company are counter to the lean philosophy?
The idea of keeping the skids filled goes against the lean philosophy. Although automated ordering system is a good idea but it should not be coupled with the idea of keeping the skids filled. Skids should be used as per the requirement of the production process. The aim should be to maintain minimum inventory, minimum possible processing delay and not only to maximise the capacity utilisation of the skids by always keeping then filled.
Adding 3 inspectors may not be a good idea because inspection time is 30 minutes and its not the bottle neck activity i.e. the activity which takes maximum amount of time to complete. Adding 3 inspectors would mean that at any point of time at least 2 inspectors will be idle which also goes against the idea of lean process.
High-rise shelving is also not required if the process is lean. A lean process means there would always be minimum amount of pieces of work in progress inventory to store. When the number of pieces will be few, there would be no use of high capacity high-rise shelves for parts coming of machine no. 4.
2. Make recommendations for lean improvements in such areas as scheduling, layout, kanban, task groupings, and inventory. Use quantitative data as much as possible; state necessary assumptions.
It is recommended to implement all the lean improvements mentioned in the question to make the process lean. By doing this the company will reap many advantag ...