Production Plan for Riordan Manufacturing - Hangzhou, China
Riordan Manufacturing is wholly owned by Riordan Industries. The company has a new Riordan electric fan manufacturing facility located in Hangzhou, China. This location is producing and distributing standard and custom plastic fans. The new facility was built to meet customer requirements effectively. These requirements include high product variety, quality lead times, shorter lead times, and low costs. Riordan plans to meet the demands of the electric fan market at minimal cost. Strategic planning will enable the company to meet its long-term goals and remain competitive in the international market. This paper discusses strategic capacity planning, identification of lean production techniques, discovery of possible bottlenecks, offering solutions, and supply chain concepts.
Strategic Capacity Planning
To ensure profitability, Riordan Manufacturing must determine the capacity level of capital resources. These resources include the facility, equipment, and labor force. Strategic capacity planning is an approach to organize the providers, distributors, and location of manufacturing and service units successfully. The objective is long-term sustainability of the overall supply chain. Each partner in the process has limited capacity. By introducing new resources, tools, and processes capacity will increase. Upon implementation of the tactical planning a monitoring process is put into operation to compare results against the plan (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2005).
Lean Production Technique
Riordan’s Hangzhou plant manufacturers fans according to an annual forecast based on average sales over the last three years (Riordan Manufacturing Home, n.d.). The forecast creates a push of product through the manufacturing process. Because of this push, finished inventory often sits for some time before it is ordered by customers. Unfortunately, inventory ties up cash, is subject to shrinkage...