Donner Company Resolution

Introduction

The present case study has the purpose of analyses the results from Donner Company. This analysis will be elaborated following the information given by the president of the company, Eduard Plummer.

From the analysis we will be able to conclude whether Donner Company is manufacturing at its full capacity and, if this is not verified, we will describe what may be causing that result and, what can be recommend to be done in order to alter it.

The Company

Donner Company, was founded in 1985 in the United States, and had as its main activity the manufacturing of printed circuit boards for different electronics manufacturers. Back in 1987 it faced competition from 750 other manufactures in the United States once the usage of electronics in our daily lives had really increased.

Eduard Plummer, the president of the company, and Altmeyer, the design engineer, thought that Donner Company had an advantage over their competitors due to the fact that they were more apt to solve problems related to new designs and prototype production techniques. This could have been possible because they created processing methods, patent applications and changed some machinery used in this industry.

In October 1987, Eduard Plummer, was reviewing Donner’s results before planning 1988 operations. Their main product was known as “soldermask bare copper” boards (SMOBC). The production of SMOBC is divided into three main stages: preparation, image transfer and fabrication. Throughout these stages, the company uses human labor and/or automated machinery.

In order to accomplish better results the company has three supervisors with different tasks each: Diane Schanabs, Bruce Altemeyer and David Flaherty. Schanabs is responsible for checking process delays and advice the customers if necessary. Altemeyer is who inspects the artwork which incorporates the specifications made by the customers. Finally, Flaherty is responsible for the whole process, since an order is received until it is shipped.

Flowchart

Problems & Recommendations

The SMOBC manufacturing process initiates at the preparation stage. In this stage, Donner Company needs to have raw materials available in stock in order to progress with the process. These materials are bought from a purchasing agent after the entrance of a requested order but, they only enter the company two days later. From our analysis, we noticed that there are three materials that are used the most: A, D and M. We got these results by doing a usage average using the information from September.

Base Stock