Dasher

Dasher Company Case Analysis

Dasher Company, a circuit board manufacturer, has been experiencing growth along with the rest of the industry during the early 2000s. With growth picking up, Dasher has been experiencing problems meeting delivery deadlines along with product quality. The problems they face stem from several areas of the company, starting with their order processing down to their manufacturing process. While these problems are important to address, there is an even more fundamental reason why Dasher is not meeting timeframes for delivery.

Problem Identification

Many of the estimations that Plummer, Dasher’s President, and Altmeyer, the design engineer, use for estimating process time is neither precise nor accurate. Many of the estimations for certain processes were numbers from competing firms, of which some of the engineers came from. Although Plummer used substantially higher figure when estimating for a bid, more accurate data would help reduce the disparity between estimates and actual outcomes.

Although Dasher has been profitable (Dasher 9-608-113, exhibit 1), there is much room for improvement. We see some problems when analyzing their typical order’s process flow (Appendix A). An important area for improvement is the initial order processing stage. It takes as much as a week from the time the order is received to the time work is started on manufacturing the circuit boards. If Plummer wants to cut delivery times, order processing is a major problem that needs to be addressed.

The meat of the problem lies within Dasher’s manufacturing process, which can be broken down into three stages: Preparation, Image transfer, and fabrication. While Plummer noticed that different bottlenecks occurred in different parts of the operation that seemed to switch day to day and from one process to another, we identified two main bottlenecks. While most of the plant is working below capacity (see Appendix B for utilization numbers), there are a few steps...