Best Practices for Kitting and Sub Assembly

2 Reduced waste: With improved systems there would be reduction in waste and fewer defects in the products. This will help in adding to the profits. Logistical improvements will help in better organisation of physical space required and viable transportation and reduction in the waiting times for the materials required, thus giving lesser room for wasting time.

Some of the disadvantages are: limiting the vendors may limit the variety of products, relinquishing inventory control over to vendors and distributors may negatively impact their customer satisfaction, and the customers may decide to deal with supplier directly which could put Best Buy at risk of loosing their business.

One of the biggest needs for improvement was the assembly process. Although several changes were made throughout the years, quality and efficiency still fell below expectations. Hinrichs implemented the newly developed assembly which consists of two separate work stations that allowed operators in the adjacent stations to share the expensive balancer machine. These assembly cells were much more efficient as workers were no longer forced to wait for another person or machine in the process. Each cell was built like the other with quick turn set-up which created flexibility in the process while also reducing tooling inventory by almost a half. Now cells

output. Additionally, assembly line will put fabricated parts together at a series of workstations to create a

Recommendation:1. Improve Just-in-time systemSpartan Plastic Limited need to improve Just-in-time system, it is control aims to maintain inventory level at zero, with an immediate objective of reducing the capital tied to the inventories. It is an important principle that able to eliminating waste throughout the production system. The waste can occur, through excess inventories and overly large lot sizes, both of which can cause unnecessarily long customer lead times. Let's explain the role of the core JIT practices in enhancing manufacturing performance. JIT manufacturing requires the establishment of JIT supplier relationships with suppliers; Spartan in this case, that is able and willing to deliver the needed quantities of parts as the needs arise and without any defects.

For entry level and multi featured assembly we always matched assembly to orders because we did not want to assembly more unless demand is high in a specific year.

The amount of work in progress is minimized. Fewer tools are needed. The parts do not have to travel between the work stations. The control systems becomes redundant, everything takes place in the garage.

The parts manufacturing process, especially for molds that were previously manufactured and maintained in inventory, is a somewhat different process than that for mold fabrication. Raw material ordered for this process usually takes a week to arrive, contributing to an extended lead time for delivery of parts to clients. Custom Molds' practice of ordering raw materials only after the specification review is clearly affecting the timely delivery of its orders, and in the parts manufacturing industry where delivery times are critical, this can affect the company's relationships with clients.

The manufacturing cost can be lower as the rearrangement of the production line to meet urgent order can be minimize or even eliminated.

Boeing made use of lean techniques in their production system and increased its production by 50% and also reduced its floor space by 40%. Assembling a Boeing 737 is a typical job. Workers should take 367,000 parts, an same number of bolts, rivets, other equipment and 36 miles (58 kilometres) of electrical wire and then keep them all combined to make an airplane [2]. Engineers to machinists were involved in lean (reducing waste) in the factory. By creating an assembly line, aircraft will pass through the workers were they going to concentrate on assembling. Allocating all employees in the factory building and organising special teams helped a lot to solve the errors in the assembly line [2]. In the assembly line, there are eight beacon lights which reflect the production status. If everything is good it shows green colour. If an error occurs, the worker will press a button and the green light will changes to yellow and the panel board will shows the category of the problem(which category it is related to). The worker will pass on to a computer and writes about the problem in a brief manner and the problem should be assigned to special team to solve it within 30 minutes if not, the light turns to purple and the assembly line will shuts down. This moving assembly is the icon of factory’s lean strategies.

The move to the state-of-the-art facility will result in the organization being more efficient and will as well result in quicker pull of inventory and quicker shipment. Furthermore, stock will be handled more efficiently with less errors resulting in higher profits for the organization.

These gains come at the cost of more tightly coordinated manufacturing processes—both inside a company and with supplier firms that produce under JIT" (Vollmann, 2005).

In most cases, computer controlled machinery affixes components onto the casing using advanced adhesives. However, because of incompatibility issues between materials, the batteries and electric motors have to be bolted on to the casing by hand, using power tools. Operatives work on the line, each making an average of 12 bolts onto the casing, ie, 1 person bolts the battery and then someone further down the line bolts the electric motor. The inspection section for the back casing of the body is the most active, the rejection rate for loose components at this point is approximately 1.2 %. A further 0.5% are rejected at final inspection, causing expensive rework situations. There is a staff turnover of 25% per annum amongst such operatives in the back casing sub assembly section.

Using design for logistic will reduce shipping and inventory cost because handling cost, space per product usually decrease; revenue per square foot usually increase.

According to [5], Just-in-Time (JIT) inventory management enables an organization to gain competitive advantage by not having a large or excessive amount of inventory in warehouse. The organization only needs to order the parts when they are actually needed and new materials are produced only when old materials have finished. One advantage of adopting this strategy is that there will be no excess of inventory that needs to be stored and hence the inventory levels will be reduced as well as the cost of carrying and storing goods. One major disadvantage of this is that the organization will expose it in the risk of ordering problems for example a supplier is not able to provide parts on time. The result of this is that the organization cannot fulfill the order and contributes to customer dissatisfaction.