Essay about Decision Analysis Task 1

The assembly line needs to produce 6 units per hour and there is room for only four workstations. The tasks and the order in which they must be performed are shown in the following table. Tasks cannot be split, and it would be too expensive to duplicate any task.

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

1. Use the decision-making model (page 196) presented in the chapter to map the decisions being made in these situations. Identify how, where, and why different decisions might be made.

The third core competency is Boeing’s dynamic assembly line. This was a valuable change to Boeing because it reduced assembly time by 50%, or from 22 days down to 11 days. The planes move 80 feet every shift and lights determine the status of the assembly line. Dynamic assembly lines are costly to imitate and rare due to the size of the plant and the components used in order to pull such a large craft throughout the building. The only substitute of a dynamic assembly line is a static assembly line, and the dynamic one performs much more efficiently.

Since the current assembly line layout should achieving 100% line efficiency when running at maximum capacity of 215 units. Thus, to operate at target 300 units/day, the current assembly line needs to redesign.

Christian Today and The Dallas Morning News tag The Potter’s House as one of the fastest growing churches in the nation. The church has more than 30,000 members and 59 ministries. Due to strong growth, the church needs additional space for it ministries. The management of the church is considering three alternatives of expanding its capacity to meet the demand of the ministries. The alternatives include: leasing additional space at its current location in Dallas, staying in Dallas but leasing new space, and moving the entire ministries operations to Houston. If the management decides to lease additional space at its current location, they have the option to move to Houston or lease new space at Dallas after five years if the church survives. The concept of decision tree will be used in this paper to analyze each alternative to advice the management the best alternative with the lowest cost. Decision tree will be used in this analysis because it is a convenient way to lay out steps of a capacity problem. The decision tree format helps not only on understanding the problem but also in finding a solution.

Tasmania is Australia’s most forested state, where it has one of the highest forest proportions on Earth. The Forestry industry in Tasmania is one of the most important economic resources for the Australian state, this industry is facing market problems because of the invasion of the low price imported timber products.

Organizational behavior helps managers to improve the organization in a good way. Decision making process is the one of the behavior in human organizational behavior. According to McShane and Von Glinow (2000), “decision making a conscious process of making choices among one or more alternatives with the intention of moving toward some desired state of affairs”. Decision making is a linear process and it includes six steps such as identifying the problems, gather and evaluate data, list and evaluate alternatives, select best action, implement the decision and getter feedback (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1).

Decision making can be described as a process of making a decision or decisions, based on choices made amongst two or more competing course of actions. The ‘Decision making’ also requires making a define choice between two or more alternatives course of actions that are available.

The travel industry was revolutionized in 1960 when airplane travel became affordable for the average person. As more people could afford to fly, there was reliance on travel agents to act as intermediaries between consumer and airline. The process for booking a flight was complicated, which is why a vast majority of fliers would consult a travel agent. This process would involve the travel agent contacting the airline via telephone in the hopes of getting the ideal flight date, or getting a date suitable for their client. If it was not for the travel agents acting as an intermediary between airline and consumer, the airline industry would have suffered because consumers would not have wanted to go through the hassle of booking a flight. Since travel agents played a critical role in the success of the airline industry, we compensated them with commission for every client they got to fly with us.

The assembly line is designed in such a way that the motions of the workers are minimized to the extent possible. The parts are transferred in sequence between stations through conveyors. The production line is explained with a brief description of the processes carried out in each station. The figure7 shows the assembly line with manual and automatic stations. Station 1, 4 and 8 are manual stations and the rest of the stations are automated. The processes carried out in each station is described

The central topic of this dissertation is decision making: the selection of an option from a set of alternatives. Some real life examples include deciding what to buy at the supermarket, or deciding whether a stimulus represents a threat or not. In these situations, the decision maker accumulates evidence for each alternative until a decision is made in favour of one option. In particular, we are interested in the cognitive processes underlying a decision and for the sake of simplicity, especially mathematical simplicity, we focus on a particular type of decision: choosing one alternative from a set of two alternatives.

Eliminating the inefficiencies created by the lack of defined procedures for returning excess inventory from the assembly lines to the raw materials warehouse is the objective of Electrolux. Establishing a written procedure and implementing it through consistent employee training will eliminate waste and reduce costs, while improving operations at the Memphis factory. For manned manufacturing systems, work process design pertains to crafting efficient manufacturing processes (Ham & Park, 2014). Efficient workflow is important to the performance of a system, as the absence can create bottlenecks and cause performance to decline. Potential exists for bottlenecks and performance decline on the Electrolux assembly lines as excess material clutters the area, making it difficult for employees to perform the tasks assigned, within the designated time allotted. However, an analysis of workstation functions can assist in determining the appropriate time to relieve excess materials from the assembly line and who should perform this function. The assembly line workstation should include a material disposition process at the end of each day, or during the changeover time to the next model variant.

A set of tasks is performed at each workstation, and each task has its own processing time. The total time required to perform each set of tasks assigned to a given assembly line must be less than the cycle time that is predetermined by the manager of the line. Hence, the production rate is determined by the cycle time. The main objective of assemble

Assembly lines Assembly-line balancing Splitting tasks Flexible and U-shaped line layouts Mixed-model line balancing Current thoughts on assembly lines Workstation cycle time defined Assembly-line balancing defined Precedence relationship defined