CASE STUDY $5\mathrm{.}1$ eport Submi...

Wescott Products

Whenever Jason Roberts thought about going to work on Friday morning, he started to get a little knot in his stomach. Jason had recently accepted the job as operations manager for a small manufacturing company that specialized in a line of assemble$-$to$-$order products. When he accepted the job he was a recent graduate of a business program where he specialized in operations. He had done fairly well in his classes and had emerged as a confident, self$-$assured person who was sure he could handle such a job in a small company.

The company, Wescott Products, had recently experienced rapid growth from the original start in a two$-$car garage just five years earlier. In fact, Jason was the first person ever named as operations manager. Prior to that, the only production manager reporting to the owner, Judy Wescott, was Frank Adams, the production supervisor. While Frank was an experienced supervisor, he had been promoted to supervisor directly from his old job as a machine operator and had no formal training in planning and control. He soon found that planning was too complex and difficult for him to handle, especially since he also had full responsibility for all the Wescott workers and equipment. Randy Stockard, the sales and marketing manager, had requested and finally applauded Judy Wescott's decision to hire Jason, since he felt production was having a much more difficult time in promising and delivering customer orders. Randy was starting to spend more and more time on the phone with angry customers when they didn't get their orders at the time they expected them. The time away from developing new sales and the danger of losing established customers started to make him highly concerned about sustaining sales growth, to say nothing about his potential bonus check tied to new sales!

Once Jason was placed in the position, however, the "honeymoon" was short, and soon Jason started doubting how much he really did know. The company was still having trouble with promising customer orders and having the capacity to meet those orders. At first he thought it was the forecasting method he used, but a recent analysis told him the total actual orders were generally within $\backslash (10\backslash \%\backslash )$ of what the forecast projected. In addition, production never seemed to have any significant shortages in either subassemblies or components. In fact, many felt they had far too much material, and in the last couple of staff meetings Jake Marris, the company controller, was grumbling that he thought the inventory turn ratio of just less than $3\mathrm{.}5$ was unreasonable and costing the company a lot of money. It must be something else, and he had to discover it quickly.

The first idea he thought about was to request the assembly areas to work overtime, but he soon found out that was a sensitive topic that could only be used as a last resort. The workers in that area were highly skilled and would be difficult, if not impossible, to The following tables summarize the data Jason collected:

$*$Most of the on$-$hand was really forced when the lot size exceeded orders for the week for that model. They would then assemble the rest of the lot as "plain vanilla," such that they could easily add any subassembly options once the actual customer orders came in$.$

Two workers are currently assigned to the work center, and only to the first shift. $59$ Even though assembly workers are very flexible, Jason cannot take workers from another assembly area, as those work centers are also behind and therefore appear to be equally overloaded.

The following is the forecast and customer orders for each of the five models assembled in work center $12$ :

Once Jason had gathered all the data, he immediately called his instructor, only to find out that by an ironic twist of fate she would be gone for more than a week on spring break.

cAssignment

This leaves you to help Jason. Specifically, you need to do the following:

$1.$ Discuss the nature and probable sources of the problem.

$2.$ Examine the rough$-$cut capacity situation using the data Jason gathered. Discuss the results and how they are linked to the problems identified in question $1.$

$3.$ Use the information and your knowledge of the situation to develop a complete plan for Jason to use in the future. Part of this plan should be to build and demonstrate the approach to master scheduling for the data given in the case.