Case Study On Johnston Products
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Added on 2019-09-30
Case Study On Johnston Products
Added on 2019-09-30
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CASE STYDY 6.1 Johnston ProductsNo matter how many times Justin Wang, the master scheduler for Johnston Products, tried, he couldn’t seem to get it through people’s minds. They kept trying to “front load” the production schedule, and the problem appeared to be getting worse.By “front loading” Justin meant that production supervisors would attempt to catch up with production they failed to make the previous week. It seemed to happen every week, and the only way Justin could get things back to a realistic position was to completely reconstruct the entire master schedule—usually about every three weeks.Last month could serve as an example. The first week of the month Justin had scheduled production equal to 320 standard hours in the assembly area. The assembly area managed to complete only 291 hours that week because of some equipment maintenance and a few unexpected part shortages. The assembly supervisor then had the workers complete the remaining 29 hours from week 1 at the start of week 2. Since week 2 already had 330 standard hours scheduled, the additional 29 hours really put them in a position of attempting to complete 359 hours. The workers actually completed 302 hours in week 2, leaving 57 hours to front load into week 3, and so forth. Usually by the time Justin came to his three-week review of the masterschedule, it was not uncommon for the assembly area to be more than 100 standard hours behind schedule.Clearly, something needed to be done. Justin decided to review some of the areas that could be causing the problem:1.Job standards Although it had been at least four years since any job standards had been reviewed or changed, Jason felt the standards could not be the problem—quite the opposite. His operations course had taught him about the concept of the learning curve, implying that if anything the standard times for the jobs should be too high, allowing the average worker to complete even more production per hour than that implied by the job standard.2.Utilization The general manager was very insistent on high utilization of the area. He felt that it would help control costs, and consequently used utilization as a major performancemeasure for the assembly area. The problem was that customer service was also extremely important. With the problems, Justin was having with the master schedule, it was difficult to promise order delivery accurately, and equally difficult to deliver the product on time once the order promise was made.3.The workers In an effort to control costs, the hourly wage for the workers was not very high. This caused a turnover in the workforce of almost 70% per year. In spite of this, thefacility was located in an area where replacement workers were fairly easy to hire. They were assigned to the production area after they had a minimum of one week’s worth of training on the equipment. In the meantime, the company filled vacant positions with temporary workers brought in by a local temporary employment service.4.Engineering changes The design of virtually all the products was changing, with the average product changing with respect to some aspect of the design about every two
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