Littlefield Technologies Executive Summary
Littlefield Technologies Executive Summary
In order to manage a production plant, such as the one in the Littlefield Technologies simulation, certain elements must be constantly monitored. Machine capacities and inventory levels must be maintained in order to reduce manufacturing throughput time and lead times while simultaneously increasing revenues.
Within the first 31 days of this simulation, our team had successfully implemented all of the above-stated elements for maintaining this plant successfully. The first things that had to be done was isolate and increase the capacity of the bottleneck. The bottleneck, in this simulation, was the machine that was over-utilized, as determined by the machine utilization chart. With the addition of a machine to one department, the bottleneck was then shifted to another department. In the end, an addition of one machine to each department successfully reduced the utilization levels of each department so that they could quickly and effectively process material through the plant. As a machine is utilized less, the products that need to be processed by that machine have a decreased wait time for an available machine, which reduces the size of the queue in front of each department. Reducing the size of these queues also decreases the throughput and lead times.
In addition to reducing the utilization of machines within departments, inventory levels had to be effectively managed. By studying past inventory data (from the first 50 days of production), our team was able to determine that the proper reorder point for the factory was 3120 with a reorder quantity of 5400. This was an effective method as it minimized the amount of stock-outs while simultaneously reducing inventory holding costs. Stock-outs were a large problem before our team took control of inventory levels, and after successfully determining the proper reorder points and quantities, we were able to significantly reduce the number of stock-outs that the...
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