Trabajo Eastern Gear Inc.

Eastern Gear Inc.

Eastern Gear Inc.

1. What are the major problems being faced by Eastern Gear?

The company has several problems due to the nature of their work. Being a customer centric company that depends on the designs of the customers, they have a long process to fulfil orders. The company struggles to optimize the whole process, but they need to find a way to do it. In summary, it is possible to say that the company has the following problems:

• They are accepting large orders when they do not have the capacity to handle that many orders, so the delivery time of small orders is being delayed. The company does not know how to correctly make the process more efficient.
• Raw material supply chain is totally inefficient. Since the company has to wait for the approval of each project, they do not have ways to have all materials accessible. Also, the individual nature of each project makes them have to request the materials when the orders are approved. However, they want to create rush orders to receive materials in 24 hours.
• The time to make the orders after the raw materials arrived has increased significantly. Before it took the company 2 weeks to have the project completed after the arrival of the materials, but it takes them 4 weeks now. It is the double time.
• The company and its activities are divided in a way that generates constant bottlenecks. The production process gets constantly interrupted by bottlenecks in the process. The complicated thing about this problem is that the bottlenecks happen in different parts of the production process.
• The products are constantly running through the whole company. As machines are grouped together in specific place of the company, products have to go forth and back in the whole production process. It makes it inefficient.
• The company is not ready for the boom happening in the market. They are trying to optimize the production process by including new people in the time, like Matt Williams. He is in charge of analyzing which orders might get delayed and mark them so that they get priority. Now, almost 20% of the orders are marked.
• 6% of the products are returned because of poor quality. There is a failure in the production process and most of these products have missed some important step in the process.

1. What actions should Eastern Gear take to solve its problems?

The company can do the following actions to solve each of its problems:

• The company should create a new technology plan for manufacturing. New technology might be an excellent way to reduce the production time and improve its efficiency. New technology could include new machinery that will help employees perform their job faster and easily. Also, this new technology could include new software that could optimize the whole process.
• The best way to solve the raw material supply chain problem is to create a warehouse where the company can keep the most common and used materials. It is true that each client might have an individual necessity, but majority of the pieces must be made with some common materials. The company should warehouse these materials, and they should explain the customers that highly personalized pieces need to wait longer because of materials problems.
• The company should optimize the whole production process. Bottlenecks are generated because the company does not have an optimized production process. Sam Bartholomew and Matt Williams need to work together to create a system to optimize the process. Bottlenecks arise when several products being made need a specific machine, so the company can use a particular software to evaluate the overlap between projects and avoid them. WorkClout might be an effective solution, as it allows to schedule the work of the whole company. This way workers can reserve or use the machine in free slots of time.
• To solve the problem of products going and coming throughout the whole company, they should change how departments are organized. Instead of making departments based on machinery and process, they could divide the company in particular production processes. Most gear follow the same procedure, so the company can take advantage of this fact and create a new division based on particular types of products. However, this new arrangement depends on how the actual space to work is.
• The problem of confronting the new boom in the market can be solved by investing in the company and people like Matt. As Exhibit 4 (Financial Data) explains, the company is increasing their income before taxes, so they can invest part of the new earning in a bigger warehouse or new machinery. Since the market says that sales will increase, it is an opportunity to invest in new machinery and workers for the company.
• The production process needs to be supervised to avoid missing steps. Software solutions can also be put in place to develop a system where employees can mark when the gear has already passed their process. This system will help to ensure that products do not miss any fundamental process, and it will reduce the number of products returned.

...