Improvements in Meeting Entrepreneurial Objectives
Review the discussion of entrepreneurial objectives in four target areas (quality, costs, delivery, and flexibility) in Section 1.3.1. Your company manufactures a single product from easily obtainable components in four operations with a batch size of 5. You determine the following problems:
- Your product does not meet the demands for product quality; returns of delivered products are frequent.
- When demand is high, you regularly run into delivery difficulties. In addition to the problem of insufficient quality - which results in frequent rework - delivery difficulties are being caused mainly by poor coordination of the manufacturing departments among themselves and with the sales department. Moreover, production at the first work center is too slow, and in-house transport cannot keep up the pace. In other areas, there tend to be too many employees, particularly in sales and distribution and quality assurance.
- You think that there is a strong fluctuation of demand per period. However, you do not have the figures to back this up. You also do not know whether you can predict future demand reliably from the sales figures of past periods.
In other words, you determine a need for improvement. Discuss with your team possible measures in each of the four target areas. For each specific measure proposed, consider the amount of investments that will be required. Decide the order in which the specific measures will be realized.