Riordan Manufacturing, Inc - Essay Example

The company has a mission of providing outstanding quality and it believes it can achieve it through deploying Total Quality Management Practices (TQM) such as Six Sigma. The company has a strong emphasis on enhancing its quality control practices in order to accomplish and exceed the quality standards set by the customers. Hence, the processes of Riordan Manufacturing should be compatible with the mission which they are undertaking to provide outstanding quality. More importantly, we know that bad quality is highly correlated with increasing costs and lost sales.

Review of the current processes The supply chain of Riordan Manufacturing is initiated by the procurement department. As raw materials are received, they are moved to the factory after validation by the respective personnel. At the same time the shipping documents of the raw materials are compared by the supervisor against the incoming orders. At the end of the day, the receiving area manager provides the details of the entire amount of raw materials to the inventory clerk who enters the information into the inventory control system.

The second stage of the supply chain starts with manufacturing of the goods which takes place when inventory from the storage area is received to the manufacturing premises. The inventory clerk adjusts the information by taking out raw materials and sub assemblies (Work in process) and incorporating them to the inventory control system.. Potential Bottlenecks and Possible Solutions As per the definition, a bottleneck is the activity in a process that inhibits or slows down the overall capacity of the process (Chase, Jacobs & Aquilano, 2006).

This reduces the productivity and causes the cost of production to increase. According to the processed defined, we need to enhance these processes a way such that inefficiencies are reduced in the system. At the current moment, the processes of supply chain management for Riordan Manufacturing are being handled through a manual process which is inefficient and consumes a lot of time. The manual based operation creates a paper based environment where there is a lot of room for error. From the beginning of the supply chain that is procuring raw materials to the final product that is delivered to the customer, every operation is performed manually.

These are the inherent bottlenecks in the system as it can have disastrous consequences in the long term as a result of inventory loss which will further trigger lost sales and an increased cost of production. The initial process of supply chain is managed by the procurement department which is supposed to procure or remove raw materials from the inventory. They use a hard copy of the data which is processed to further departments. This is a major hurdle in the way of improving efficiency since it increases the physical transaction that is involved with each department.

Furthermore, the productivity of the department also slows down since each department has to enter the data into their respective database. An optimal solution to handle this issue is to implement a single online system which can