1. What is the standard labor time for an order of 1 board? 8 boards? 200 boards?

STANDARD LABOUR TIME FOR 1 LABOUR TIME FOR 8 LABOUR TIME FOR 200 PRODUCTION TIME BOARD BOARDS BOARDS OPERATION SET-UP RUN SET-UP RUN TOTAL SET-UP RUN TOTAL SET-UP RUN TOTAL PHASE I: PREPARATION Artwork 29 0 29 0 29 29 0 29 29 0 29 Generation Inspect & Shear 20 0.5 20 0.0625 20.0625 20 0.5 20.5 20 12.5 32.5 Punch Tooling 10 0.5 10 0.0625 10.0625 10 0.5 10.5 10 12.5 22.5 Holes PHASE II: IMAGE TRANSFER Drill Manual 15 0.08 15 40 55 15 320 335 15 8000 8015 CNC 240 0.004 CNC Drill cannot be used CNC Drill cannot be used 240 400 640 Metallization 10 0.75 10 0.09375 10.09375 10 0.75 10.75 10 18.75 28.75 Dry Film Photoresist Panel Prep 5 0.2 5 0.025 5.025 5 0.2 5.2 5 5 10 Laminate & 20 2 20 0.25 20.25 20 2 22 20 50 70 Expose Develop 20 0.2 20 0.025 20.025 20 0.2 20.2 20 5 25 Electroplate 25 8.5 25 1.0625 26.0625 25 8.5 33.5 25 212.5 237.5 Strip DFPR 5 0.2 5 0.025 5.025 5 0.2 5.2 5 5 10 Etch & Tin Strip 10 0.2 10 0.025 10.025 10 0.2 10.2 10 5 15 PHASE III: FABRICATION Solder Mask 45 1.5 45 0.1875 45.1875 45 1.5 46.5 45 37.5 82.5 Solder Dip 30 0.5 30 0.0625 30.0625 30 0.5 30.5 30 12.5 42.5 Profile Punch Press 50 1 50 1 51 50 8 58 50 200 250 CNC Router 150 0.5 150 0.5 150.5 150 4 154 150 100 250 Inspect, Test, 45 1.5 45 1.5 46.5 45 12 57 45 300 345 Pack Assumptions Profiling through Punch Press Profiling through Punch Drilling through CNC Press Machine Labor Time 383.38125 694.05 1840.25 in minutes Labor Time 6.3896875 11.5675 30.67083333 in hours

2. How is Donner doing? What problems do you see? Why do these problems exist? Donner has to improve its production methods in order to compete effectively with other printed circuit board manufacturers. It has to reduce the delay period of deliveries and percentage of orders rejected or returned due to operational mistakes. It is growing rapidly with increase in net sales. But it needs to address the production problems in order to achieve the desired growth targets (3 million US$ by 1988). We see following problems with the company (i) Raw Material Related a. Dependent upon outside suppliers for raw material supply. b. No definite estimates as different orders need different raw materials. c. Several days delay between order reaching a supervisor and raw materials reaching him. (ii) Order Process Related a. Different order sizes from different customers. b. Four day rush orders disrupt other work flows. These gain priority over existing work flow and create bottlenecks as they hold up operators working on previous orders. c. Re-working of orders rejected by customer or requiring minor changes. This eats into operators time and takes them away from normal work. d. Work delayed due to late delivery of customer artwork modification or design changes (caused 1/4th of delayed jobs in a process) (iii) Production Related a. Operators disrupted frequently on the job (6-12 times) to secure more work from an upstream process, to seek advice on a problem and to deliver completed work. b. Flaherty delayed scheduling decision until the arrival of raw materials. c. Work piles up with some operators even as others are free. The bottleneck keeps shifting for each different product or work flow. d. Resources are tied up in bottlenecks, which is not definite and hence a mitigation strategy cannot be worked out without changing the current workflow process. (iv) Quality Related a. Differing quality expectations with different orders b. Boards were returned because of failure to perform all the required operations. c. Pre-shipment reject rates of 7%, which consists of total losses (15% of reject) and incomplete operations (85% of reject). This was probably because of bottleneck tying up some operations and some boards missing these operations in the confusion. d. All these issues have led to recent failures in maintaining quality standards and meeting delivery deadlines. Customer returns have increased to 3% from 1% and shipments are 9 days delayed on average. (v) Delivery Related a) 4 of Donners competitors are promising 4 week delivery on small orders (<1000), and if Donner performance delivery continues to fall then it will fail to reach its sales target of 3 million US$, as it will lose its competitive strength of promising delivery in 3 weeks (pre-August performance). (vi) Layout and Plant Design Related a) Different processes of the work flow are separated (in order to extend the equipment lifetime) and this causes a lot of operator time to be wasted in walking between the different work stations. (vii) Labor Efficiency Related a) No defined role, work flow requirements lead them to different stations, causing significant loss of productivity compared to a situation where one worker was handling only one defined task.

3. What specific actions do you recommend Plummer take to address these problems? Regarding Raw materials: a) Holding common raw materials(copper foils, dielectric insulators, leads) inventory to reduce lead time, try to forge contracts with those suppliers who supply raw materials during rush orders for general orders as well. b) Donner should open a Purchase department and employ a purchase manger instead of asking a purchase agent for raw materials supply. Regarding order process related: a) After employment of purchase manager, the process engineer (Altmeyer) can concentrate on making different checks to stop skipping of some process steps. As well as , he can ensure design at the start of the process from customers and reducing re-work due to change in design b) By observing table 1, we can say that drilling holes is the bottleneck of the process as per general flow: If we calculate the No. of boards in a single order, for which time taken by CNC machine is equal to manual drills: 240+ 0.004*500*y=15+ 0.08*500*y y=5.92 So for batch order size >= 6, Donner should use CNC machines. (The current policy is to use CNC machine only in the case of order size > 100). It will also increase utilization of CNC from current level and decrease dependency on manual drills. Also, we need to use CNC router for batch size>=200 for profiling. (Clear by Ans. To question 1) For batch size<6 Drilling Profiling Manual Punch Press For batch size>=6 and <=200 CNC Punch Press For Batch size>200 CNC CNC Router

Regarding Order size Currently, Donner is fulfilling low size orders as well as high size orders (From batch size 1 to 1050). Diversification may be a desirable options but it is hampering Donners current capacity by creating randomness in system. It might go for high batch size orders with simple technology boards (batch size>=100). There it will be saving set up times. Even in September87, 88% boards belonged to high batch size orders. It shows that Donner has gained sufficient trust in its customers for supplying high batch size orders. As well as, Donner may also operate in low batch sizes (Batch size<=8) and charge premium for those batches. The smaller batch sizes will ensure quality and all process steps maintained as well as rush orders can also be included there. Donner should stop taking orders between batch size of 8 and 100. It will reduce randomness in system. This part along with revised plan for drilling and profiling will tackle shifting of bottlenecks Regarding Production: a) The scheduling should be started as soon as blue print of order is received by Flaherty. He should not wait for arrival of raw materials as arrival will be ensured by Purchase manager. A supervisor should also be employed to assist Flaherty in scheduling of Rush Orders. Regarding Quality: The new scheme of production manager, Purchase manger and selected batch sizes will automatically tackle quality issues related to skipping of process. Further, Donner may use some international standards in its inspection station and train its employees for the same.

Regarding delivery: Shipping policy needs to be changed to clearing orders weekly so that delivery may become more equally distributed across the month. Regarding layout: To avoid production breaks due to frequent movement of operators between stations, company may install small conveyors between stations reducing wastage of time of employees as well as company. Regarding labor Efficiency : The avoiding of middle sized batch orders will supposedly tackle this problem.