IMT-51: Manufacturing Strategy

Part - A

Q1. What is meant by manufacturing strategies?

Q2. What is World Class Manufacturing?

Q3. Explain Schonberger's model of World Class Manufacturing.

Q4. Explain Deming's approach to Total Quality Management.

Q5. What is time based competition?

Part - B

Q1. What is Flexible Manufacturing?

Q2. What are lean production tools?

Q3. Explain the concept of SMED.

Q4. What is Statistical Quality Control?

Q5. What is rapid prototyping?

Part - C

Q1. How JIT support manufacturing strategies?

Q2. Enumerate various manufacturing management tools.

Q3. What is the role of various IT tools in creating manufacturing strategy?

Q4. Explain various manufacturing performance measurement system

Q5. Explain the concepts of Kanban, Poka yoke, Benchmarking & TPM.

Case Study - 1

The California-based company, started in 1980, pioneered the development of the 5.25 inch hard disk drives that had been the standard for personal computer manufacturers. By the mid-1980s, Seagate was the leading manufacturer of these drives, with sales in excess of $700 million. By all accounts, its future looked bright.

A brief history of the hard-disk drive industry is helpful in understanding events at Seagate in the late 1980s. The architecture of the hard-disk drive had gone through a number of changes since the mid-1970s. The original drives were 14 inches and designed to service the needs of mainframe computer manufacturers. The late 1970s saw the architectural change to an 8-inch drive, which was small and required less power to operate. However, the storage capability of the new drive was substantially less than that of the older architecture and thus not of interest to the customers of the 14-inch drive manufacturers. Further production of the new drives required substantial changes in existing manufacturing systems. These conditions led manufacturers of 14-inch drives to ignore this architectural change in technology. As 8-inch drives were further developed, their capacity was increased and they became the standard for the next generation computer, known as the "mini". In this new market, original manufacturers of 14-inch drives were no longer key players. Instead, new firms that focused their efforts on the new architecture were to lead the way.

The scenario was played out again with the next architectural change-from 8-inch drives to 5.25-inch drives during the early 1980s. As the performance characteristics of these new drives were enhanced, they became a key component in the new personal computer. As noted earlier, Seagate had focused its attention and resources on this new architecture, becoming the pioneer and the leading producer in the market.

In the mid-1980s, another new architecture began to appear-the 3.5-inch drive. Seagate was second in the industry in developing a working prototype of the drive, and by 1985 they had developed more than 80 models using the new architecture. However, as with its predecessors, early versions lacked the storage capacity that Seagate's customers were demanding. Further, large-scale production of these units would require a retooling in the production process. The expected low sales volume and high unit cost of the 3.5 inch drive led the management to shelf further development of the unit. Instead, they focused their development efforts on further increasing the performance characteristics of the 5.25 inch drives.

By 1987, the storage capacity of the 3.5 inch drives had increased sufficiently to compete in the mainstream computer market. The small size of the new units also made them ideal for the next generation of computer- the portable or laptop computer. It was only then that Seagate took its 3.5 inch technology off the shelf for further development. However, by that time Conner Peripherals and Quantum Corporation had already established market leadership by focusing their development efforts on the new architecture. As a result, Seagate had become a second-tier supplier in the new portable computer market.

Q1. Enumerate the causes of Seagate becoming a second-tier supplier in the new portable computer market. 

Q2. What proactive manufacturing strategy could have arrested Seagate's downfall?

Case Study - 2

At first glance, the fry station at McDonald's restaurant in Mishawaka, Indiana, looks like any other fry stationsame size, same silver color. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that it is no run-of-the-mill spud fryer. Most notably, it has no human attendance. Instead, it weighs, cooks, times, shakes, dumps and fries by itself, without help from crew members.

The fry station, part of a McDonald's program known as ARCH (Automated Restaurant Crew Helper), is one of the country's highest-profile examples of food service automation. It is also a part of a growing trend that is slowly moving the industrial robot into service sector. "When you look at an automotive assembly line, you realize that is not much of a stretch to apply automation to fast food or any number of other applications," notes Gay Engel Berger, chairman of the International Service Robot Association in Ann Arbor Michigan.

McDonald's fry-maker is only one prong of a corporate program that has begun to automate the firm's food preparation. The company also has introduced ARCH drink, an automated drink machine that dominates the need for crew members to grab cups, shovel ice and operate drink valves. ARCH robots are now employed at 5.5 percent of the company's 9,000 domestic stores. The company's grand plan is to remove as much labor as possible from the kitchen area and move them to the service counter. Robots significantly reduce the time it takes to fill an order, thereby reducing the time a customer waits after placing an order.

The fry-maker automatically drops fries into baskets, lowering the baskets into cooking oil, shaking them intermittently to remove clumps and then dumping finished fries for bagging.

Because they were custom-designed to blend with existing cooking equipment, both robots look remarkably unrobotic. They are neither as big nor as complex as the robots often seen on factory floors. Designed for use by people who have never before seen a real robot, let alone worked with one, they have been endowed with special safety features-among them, a shutdown mechanism that is activated when the robot arm encounters human resistance.

McDonald's ARCH program is not limited to robots or just automating food production. An automated ARCH production system helps a store manager in sales forecasting and production planning. The system, for example, tells the manager how many hamburgers, cheeseburgers or fries he or she can expect to sell over the next ten minutes. It indicates how many packages of tartar or Big Mac sauce the manager should have on hand for the day depending on recent sales patterns. Based on the demand patterns in a day, the system could also help the manager decide how many employees are needed at different time slots and thus assist in staff planning.

Q1. Why do McDonald's acquire new technologies? 

Q2. What are the strategies behind acquiring the new technologies?