Draft a plan that will leverage data to improve production performance in a factory. The factory should

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Question:

Draft a plan that will leverage data to improve production performance in a factory. The factory should be able to produce 400 products per day, but malfunctions and other delays in parts have it down to an average over the last two months of 250 products per day. This is unprofitable, and the company wants you to use data to find the best way to solve the problem.

The plan should include:

data sources
analysis techniques
process for developing and implementing recommendations

The factory that you are concerned about has the following attributes:

Production: There are two production lines. Each produces 200 products in a 24 hour period working all three shifts.

Machinery: Six robotic assemblers on each of the two lines. 6 of which were purchased in the last two years, and submit fault analysis data into the network server when things appear to be wrong or out of tolerance. They also submit data when everything is running correctly just to monitor the performance. The other 6 are slightly older and only submit the fault data when something breaks.

Material supply: Material arrives from the suppliers each day so that we do not need to store it. If one part is late, it can stop the line. Parts arrival, lead times to order, etc, are all in the inventory system.

Labor: There are 20 machinists and mechanics that run the facility. There are three mechanics who keep the robots running. One on each shift. They are all trained on maintenance of the equipment. One has 10 years experience, one, has 5 and one is brand new. Each of their training levels are recorded including any updates they get. Each clocks in and out. When one is sick, or on vacation, they may trade shifts or expand shifts, but it often means that a shift will go without a mechanic on duty.

Supply: There is a machine stock room with shelves with the parts that most commonly break on the machines. We have the parts in house to repair a robot about 65% of the time. This is all in an inventory system.

Maintenance: A line comes to a stop when one of the machines breaks. The amount of time to fix one of the robots usually is between 1 hour if we have the parts on hand and 24 hours if we need to get support from the manufacturer or a part rushed to us.

Make an analysis plan that will tell the boss how you plan to look at the data and make suggestions on improvement. If you need new collection systems that will help, recommend those as well.

Consider all the details above in the plan. Range broadly in your consideration of where we might be able to make improvements and how we would use data to steer the implementation of those improvements over time.