Operations Management - House Game Memo

House Building Game Memo

Name___Chujun Chen_______

Round 1

The entire manufacturing process was an assembly line; each station was responsible for one simple step. Forklift operator was a communicator between stations to make sure that the assembly line can flow smoothly. Production Control was responsible for tracking the batch number, and separate base and roof. Base press station was responsible to cut off base, and roof press station was responsible to cut apart roof. Roof fold station then folded the roof, and base subassembly station modified the base. After all of above, all parts passed on to the final assembly station. Before we deliver the products to customer, all the houses went through quality control station. Finally, the customer made his decisions.

In Round 1, I was the base subassembly. My job description showed that I needed to fold along all the thin black lines of the base and then staple it as perfectly as possible. Since this was a two-step work, it was a little time consuming. In the first round, people were sitting at their assign seat not based on their role. We followed the instructions and processed all the parts in batches (4 in a batch). This led to a very inefficient process because the forklift operator needed to wait for a whole batch of parts and move the inventory after each single step. I observed that inventory was a big problem especially for the base press and my part. The base press was required a lot of cutting while I was required careful folding and stapling which could be inadequate if it were rushed. So these two steps would be the bottleneck of the whole process in my team for round 1. Another problem is that the quality control could not see the houses before the final assembly, some houses were rejected after a lot of effort. If quality control could observe the entire process, they could take actions to fix the problem when they saw poor quality parts instead of having it go through all the steps and then being rejected. 

Redesign
Before the second round, our team hold a quick meeting and decided to sit in order align to manufacturing process. This can make parts easily flow through each station and then decrease the flow time. The second change we made was to cancel the role of delivering in batches. Workers in each station could pass the parts to the next station after they finish their own job without sticking 4 in a batch. This would partly solve the inventory problem. The quality control would go through whole process from beginning to the end.