Donner Case Analysis

Striving to improve organizational productivity and quality are critical aspects of any organization. In today’s fast-changing and dynamic business environment, organizations seek to come up with different strategies that can help them improve their level of productivity. The emergence of science and technology has helped to streamline the level of productivity and the quality of products that organizations take to the market. Additionally, it is through technological advancement that organizations can optimize the performance of its employees. This essay seeks to evaluate the challenges faced by Donner Company in terms of the process of flow of the production system, orders that can be scheduled on the CNC Drill, the capacity of the Dry Film Photoresist area and the overall wellbeing of the organization. Donner Company produces printed circuit boards to specifications dictated by customers by designing new prototypes that fully meet the expectations of consumers. Some of the problems the company has encountered include challenges with sustaining the company operations, problems with operations, quality and delivery.

Normal Process flow of the Production at Donnar

The company’s work process can be divided into three critical stages; the preparation stage, the image transfer stage and the fabrication stage. Once an order is made and received, the price is quoted to reflect the labor and costs of materials. Once the client accepts the order, the company makes a delivery within 3 weeks for orders that are quoted as less than 1000 boards. For boards more than 1000 boards, the delivery time is estimated as 5 weeks. Rush orders are also accepted and have to be delivered within 4 days of the order. The process flow chart is as indicated below

The Donnar Company Production Process

One of the main challenges that the organization faced at the production process design was the time-to-time changing bottleneck process at the manufacturing system. This was occasioned by the continuous client’s change in product specifications, delays occasioned by improper management and the procurement policies especially of raw materials. At the productivity stage, some of the challenges included having idle machines with working hours that are incorrectly defined and finally, higher estimates of time than that of competitors.

Orders to be scheduled on the CNC drill? On CNC router?

Estimated time for operationalization in run time per board

The time for the manual drill 15 is given as 0.08 * 500 = 40

The time for the CNC Drill 240 is estimated as 0.004 * 500 = 2

Comparing the CNC Drill vs Manual Drill

If y is given as the order size, then 15 + 40y = 240 + 2y; which implies that y is approximately 6. Consequently, the Company has to employ the CNC Drill of orders of at least 6 boards while the manual Drill process has to employ all order of less than 6 boards. This is as a result of the fact that the time of production of the CNC is less than manual for the order sizes that are more than 6 units.

The Capacity for the Dry Film Photoresist area

The assumptions made is that the available working hours are 8 hours per day and the setup for the subsequent step begins after the end of the previous step’s run.

For the order sizes of 8 units, the total time of production for 8 boards are approximately 47 mins. Therefore, the capacity per day given in orders will be (8 boards*60)/47 which is approximately10 orders every day. An increase in the size of the order will result in a reduction in the order capacity per day while the daily optimum utility of boards will increase. This is as a result of  the set-up time that often has a negative implication on eventual production.

How Donnar is doing in terms of Quality, delivery and productivity

Although there has been a remarkable increase in sales in the larger quarter, the company’s profit and loss shows that there was a reduction in the net profit before tax. The profit before tax reduced from $ 14,800 in August of 1987 to $ 3,100 in September of that year. Similarly, there was a reduction in net sales and the gross profit margin. The reduction in profit levels can be linked to the inefficiencies in the company’s manufacturing processes. One of the major issues that the company has faced is poor quality of products as explained by the increase in the number of products returns by customers which increased from 1% to 3%. 10% of the boards returned to the Company were often damaged or regarded as out of tolerance. Others were returned after the company failed…