Littlefield Technologies Group H11

Background
The Littlefield Technologies factory has three stations that conduct Board Stuffing, Testing and
Tuning.
Key Performance Indicators
Present Cash Balance: 1,091,557
Max. Jobs Accepted: 11
Current units in Inventory: 7620 (Raw Kits)
Strategy
Our strategy will entail effectively managing the Throughput, Inventory and Operational
Expenses in the factory to maximize the cash balance.
We plan to do this exercise by analyzing and optimizing the process on following parameters
a) We will initiate the analysis by demand estimation exercise using a regression model based
on the past 50 days data to forecast the average demand for the next 5 months.
b) After demand estimation, we plan to identify the bottleneck in the overall process and
increase its capacity (If the demand is greater than the capacity of the process) by adding new
machines so as to increase the overall process capacity.
c) We will work-out the capacity of the process at various batch sizes such as 60, 30 or 15 and
will optimize the batch size to decrease the flow time and inventory levels across the process,
thereby saving inventory costs
d) We also plan to analyze the flow times and accordingly make contracts, which are more
profitable. i.e. if the flow time is near to 6 hours and the variance of the flow times is less it is
better to commit through a 6 hours contract to generate additional revenues
e) Alignment and sequence of the machines we also play a critical role in deciding the overall
capacity of the process. If the machine with lowest capacity (bottleneck) is placed at the end
in the process the inventory in the process would be mostly of almost finished product with
higher value and hence the sequence of jobs will also be analyzed to understand the
inventories build up
f) We will also try to implement control limits for each of the process. This will help us in
avoiding response to the inherent variability in the process