Beck Manufacturing and Plant Capacity
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BUS 644 Operations Management
Dr. XXXXXXXXXXXX
December 19, 2014
Introduction
With so many variables available to managers who specialize as opposed to a deliberately restricted capacity management model
Plant Capacity Solutions for Beck Manufacturing
Calculate the capacity of each machine center and the capacity of the system (Vonderembse & White, 2013)
Operation Center
Machines Available
Runtime piece/minute
Reject Rate (RR)
Capacity
Milling
5
2
3.00%
145.5
Grinding
7
3
5.00%
133
Boring
3
1
2.00%
176.4
Drilling
6
2.5
7.00%
133.92
Capacity of the System
133
Analyze where the focus of the company’s efforts should be if Beck wants to expand capacity. Determine how much extra capacity he can get without causing another operation to become the bottleneck.
Efficiency should be the key focus for Mr. Beck and his increased capacity. The culprit for the biggest constraint is the Grinding department by limiting the overall capacity of the system with the smallest capacity rating per reject rate (Vonderembse & White, 2013). The Drilling department is not much improved even with the reduction is reject rate. The solution is two-fold; decrease the reject rate through training and possible upgrades in material selection process or machinery, which may not make significant gains (Vonderembse & White, 2013).
The second solution is to purchase additional machinery in the Drilling and Grinding departments. Further to this, by increasing the amount of WIP across to the next station to keep the other stations busy would increase capacity but at the expanse of increasing WIP which would be an accounting or finance department decision (Douglas, 2012). To avoid further bottlenecks the Milling department optimized accordingly to ensure that when the Grinding and Drilling department’s capacity are increased the Milling department is capable of following along in a...