Business

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Assignment – Littlefield Technologies

Team “Trump” was appointed to manage the Littlefield Technologies factories for 168 simulated days to make sure that the factory was on track for timely delivery of its product to its customers. The strategy was to check on the factory twice a day and to try limiting the transactions done at a single time in order to better observe if the changes had an impact or not.

The factory consisted of mainly three stages: Station 1 – Board Stuffing, Station 2 - Testing and Station 3 - Tuning. We had to maintain adequate machine utilization at every station to make sure that the customer demand was met. During the first 50 simulated days we observed that there was an increase in the number of kits queued at Station 1 and a 100% machine utilization on days 27, 40, 42, 43, 44 and 47, even though the number of jobs accepted each day remained constant.

Figure 1: Daily Average Number of Kits Queued for Station 1

Figure 1: Utilization of Station 1 Averaged Over Each Day

Neither of stations 2 or 3 had a queue greater than 100 or utilization of over 100%, so it appeared as if station 1 was the bottle neck. Therefore, increasing the number of machines in the Station 1 on day 50 was the only choice. We observed that inventory levels also peaked between days 43 and 45, though the cash position remained constant. This purchase helped to reduce the queue and utilization of Station 1 for the next few simulated weeks. Next, the queuing at Station 3 was building up during days 70 to 72. We thus tried switching the priority at Station 2 to step 4, with the assumption that having priority at step 2 may have built up queuing at the Station 3. This was also more economical to than buying a machine at the Station 3.

Though the queuing of kits increased to 120 on day 78 at the Station 1, utilization remained steady at 98%. The number of completed jobs was exceptional at 12 with an...