Goal

1. Alex has discovered how bottlenecks affect the system. How is Alex explaining this to his staff and what problems does he encounter in explaining this?

Answer:

Alex and his team have identified the two bottlenecks for the plant is NCX-10 and the heat treat and that’s the reason they define a priority strategy for these machines.

Alex explains the below steps will be taken to prioritize all the materials in the plant, so everybody in the plant knows what to work on.

1. They made an administrative decision to only work on parts that were needed for waiting customer orders and not waste Bottleneck time making parts to be sold someday. This would make sure they don’t spend time on creating excessive inventory and work on priority orders.-Ch 21

2. Worker schedules were changed so that the Bottlenecks would not sit idle during workers’ lunch breaks; if a break came during a setup, workers would finish the setup before breaking.

3. All WIP work on the floor will tagged with a color and number on it -The tag will have two colors -Red or Green. Red tags were placed on each part that would go through a Bottleneck, to make sure the Bottleneck parts progressed rapidly to the Bottlenecks. This ensured a significant queue in front of the Bottlenecks, so they would never run out of material to work on. The second color Green - when ever there is choice between Reds or Green, red takes higher priority than green. Work on the green orders only if you have no red orders to work with. By doing this the plant was first working on late orders (priority orders) , this would help in speeding the delivery of late shipments.

4. Each tag will also have number attached to it, the lower number needs to be worked on first.

Some of problems he encounters

1. On getting a change done on the work schedules, Alex had to convey the message to Mike O’Donnell, the union local president. Mike was upset with the new work schedule. But then Alex tries to explain to him the situation...