Case Study Two

Case #2 Custom Molds, Inc.

Summary

Custom Molds was founded by a Tom and Mason Miller in 1987 to provide high quality, custom-designed molds for manufacturers of electronic connectors for producing plastic parts. They worked closely with their customers. In recent years, the changing environment of the electronics industry had a profound impact on the way Custom Molds conducts its business and manufacturing processes. The delivery problems taking 4 to 5 weeks, the sales mix changed and quality problems, provoked the company to review its business approaches to address the following issues:

1) Altering trends in the electronics manufacturing industry that caused changes in customer order needs

2) bottlenecks in the production environment would occur to be unpredictable.

3) Quality issues

4) Delivery times

Question 1 - What are the major issues facing Tom and Mason Miller?

There are many issues facing for Tom and Mason Miller. The company had some major issues is with the electronics industry which was supposed to be high quality customer designed molds producing for plastic parts. Each mold had to meet exact standards and be unique to the customer. Their reputation grew as designer and fabricator of molds. The demand for supply for plastic was decreasing but the parts were increasing. The comparing of the mold fabrication and plastic parts, it is pure that the plastic parts have potential to have higher sales than mold fabrication on the sizes ordered. These two owners can chose whether to get rid of one and keep the other and maybe just focus on the company’s success. The two processes of production in the facility were two opposite processes. One was fabrication where the wait time was 3-4 weeks. Then when it comes in they look on a schedule to get this finished on time. Which these few steps made the time for delivery not on time. That makes the company look bad and not dependable. The order of molds had remained stable but the years...