The Company under Study - Essay Example

The company under study is a small manufacturing firm, which produces metal bead chains. This company is doing business since early 20’s and is continuing till now. It has not got a huge set up but only 20 machines, having two sets of dies which are capable of manufacturing 7 sizes of chains. The company is using brass, steel and stain-less steel as raw material and has additional facilities like own die production, a computer numerical control machine for production of dies. They also have special machines for packaging of units. The company possesses an experienced production manager with an experience of 18 years. It has also a well experienced technical manage, 3 die makers, 4 setters with 4 helpers. While carrying out the case study, following problems can be identified, which are related to the firm in one way or the other:

1. Under utilization of production capacity.
2. Machine stoppages due to quality problems which is a result of under maintained machineries.
3. Manufacturing with steel and stainless steel which are harder metals and do not suite to the companies production set up and due to lack of engineering base the life of dies are minimized the repairing of which, takes an hours time by the setters which is surely a time loss.
4. Speed of machines become slowest in making chain sin the largest size in steel and stainless steel.
5. The quality assurance department is handled by the production manager; quality should always be separate from production.
6. Despite of availability of production software, production plans are made by the production manager.
7. The stock of production material is not been taken care of.
8. A huge stock of un-plated chain has accumulated.
9. The manager is using oil in increasing productivity.
   

   Application of software’s should be carried out planning of production instead of using past experience know how, all machine should be allocated in volume of order of different sizes of chains. The machines for manufacturing of steel and stainless steel chains should be separated so that the fast production of brass chains does not get hampered. Quality issues should not be handled by a production manager as the production manager is responsible for executing production that is higher number of units per day and making machines reach maximum efficiency. This can make him over look the quality issues that are related to product development. The persons who are responsible for quality management should also take of material in-process.