Lean Production at Riordan - Essay Example

Riordan should embrace lean production and strategic capa planning for their process design. They are a plastic injection moulding company. Plastic bottles, fans, heart valves, medical stents and plastic parts are all completely viable underneath lean production strategies: They do not need extensive backorders for projects, and can easily use market-prediction techniques to predict a backlog; further, there are not major spikes in the needs for these products, and their customers can predict these spikes anyways and give them the information weeks to months in advance so they can ramp up production as needed.

Chase, Jacobs and Aquilano describe lean production thusly: “Lean production is an integrated set of activities designed to achieve high-volume production using minimal inventories of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods. Parts arrive at the next workstation “just in time” and are completed and move through the process quickly. Lean is also based on the logic that nothing will be produced until it is needed. Production need is created by actual demand for the product. When an item is sold, in theory, the market pulls a replacement from the last position in the system—final assembly in this case”.

Riordan can have a set number of bottles, valves, fans, etc. When one is exhausted by a sale, a new one is created. Only the minimum amount of inventory to allow this to happen is necessary, which lets Riordan save on overhead and pass that savings onto it customers. Lean production is intimately connected to technology. The current company's website is woefully out of date: Copyrighted 2004, it seems like a 1999-era site with no Web presence. They need to create a supplier portal that allows suppliers to upload their slated needs months in advance.

Doing so, they can have constantly up-to-date information on what their production needs are and thus become leaner and more strategic in capacity management.