Lehigh Steel Case Study Essay

Next, the cement plants have changed a lot They have long since got rid of them but when I was working there they still had the stables where they kept the horses. Now they use trucks to haul cement.” This shows that the cement plant has changed over the years. Horse labor is not a modern practice. This is an example of how the cement plant has changed over the years. Stan also says, “ Right before I started working there (in 1967) they had just changed the style of kiln that they used. Lehigh used to have a kiln similiar to The Northwestern States Cement Company. It was long and produced high quality cement but could only produce about 30 tons of cement an hour. That’s not a lot of cement. Lehigh installed a pre- heater type of kiln. That thing produced high quality cement and did it cheaper. It also could make about two hundred tons of cement an hour. It was a unique design.” The kiln is what is used to melt the raw materials into cement. In the early 1960’s Lehigh’s engineers saw that at the rate they were producing cement they would have some financial problems in the future. So they designed a new type of kiln that is still used today. This is another way that Lehigh cement changed. “ In 1977, Lehigh was bought out by

ACCT 315 – 01 Daniel Allington Due: April 11, 2017 Reflection Paper for The Goal: A process of ongoing improvement (Goldratt) 1. Say we have identified the bottleneck machine of a production process. List at least four things suggested in the book that will result in a greater throughput without actually expanding the physical capacity

Managerial Accounting: John Deere Component Works John Deere Component Works (JDCW), subdivision of John Deere and Co. was in charged specifically of the manufacturing of tractor component parts. The demand for JDCW’s products had problems due to the collapse of farmland value and commodity prices. Numerous and constant failures in JDCW’s competition for bids, alerted top management to start questioning their current costing methods. As an outcome, the analysis has to be guided to research on the current costing methods with the intention of establishing legitimacy and to help the company in adopting a more appropriate costing system.

manufacturing Thus albeit not evenly applied to every product, the overhead cost is proportionately applied to each product in regard to direct labor. Ultimately material cost, direct labor cost, and overhead cost are summed up to determine the standard unit cost of each product.(Bruns, 1997, exhibit 3) This causes the pumps to appear rellativly expensive in comparison to the other products because this product is rellatively labor intense.(Bruns, 1997, exhibit 2) Exhibit 4 uses Revised Unit Costs as accounting method. In which the overhead is allocated to a material overhead and another overhead base, based on the machine hours, as well as accounting for the set up labor costs for every run. The material

In 1892, Frick realized there was no centralized management for the company and decided to combine everything to form the Carnegie Steel Company. It was worth $25 million and was the largest steel company in the world. Frick became greedy and wanted to increase profits, so he lowered employee wages. Workers began to strike, so Frick hired 300 strikebreakers to resolve the situation. There was a battle that lasted a day and 60 men were wounded.

Throughput and Inventory and Operational Expense It is stressed in the Goal that there is a massive difference between throughput and efficiency. The novel makes the case that having an efficient operation does not equate to profitability. What does equate to profitability is to increase the throughput of any given operations

Arizona Copper Strike: Conflict Analysis Copper is an essential part of the history of the United States, as most industrial machines need copper to operate. Wiring, vehicle construction, and roofing are but a few things made with copper. PDC was one of the leading copper mines in the Arizona. PDC was the “owner” of Morenci, the company owns or controls major services in the town, everything from electric power to the police service (Rosenblum, 1995 p.5). Many of the mineworkers, a majority (80%), were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, who settled in Arizona in the early parts of the 20th century. This ethnic group fought long and hard for union representation as a way to solidify employee benefits and hold PDC accountable for unfair labor laws. In 1981, an economic recession affected the price of precious metals, including copper. In 1982, PDC faced three challenges: international competition, hard bargaining unions, and resistance to internal changes. PDC was forced to terminate 3,400 miners’

Nature is also used as reinforcement of those ideologies. “Chicago and the nation entered the Progressive era. …The 1901 steel strike ended in defeat for the union, and the once powerful Amalgamated slipped into irrelevancy. Chicago’s steel mills remained unorganized, yet U.S steel tried to sidestep Chicago radicalism by developing a whole new town just across the border in Indiana. Gary, Indiana became the center of the region’s steel industry. Not overtly planned in the tradition of Pullman but nonetheless a company town…”

Introduction Glaser Health Products manufactures medical items for the health care industry. Production involves machining, assembly and painting. Finished units are then packed and shipped. The financial controller is interested to introduce an activity-based costing (ABC) system to allocate (or distribute) indirect costs to products. Indirect costs, as distinct from direct costs, cannot be unambiguously linked to specific products. The controller would like to calculate product costs based on ABC for planning and control, not inventory valuation.

Alex comes up with the consensus that the “Goal” of his business and many others is to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment and their cash flow at the plant. This basically means to make money. These three measurements can be achieved by looking closer into his second set of measurements. Alex specifically must find a way to increase throughput while at the same time decreasing it inventory and operational expenses. All three of these measurements must be cautiously monitored since they all rely on each other to be obtained in balance. Factors that cause throughput, inventory, and operational expenses to become unbalanced are excess manpower and balance capacity of the demand of resources in the market.

I must also identify how I can “abolish local efficiencies” for a bottlenecked resource and which vital changes would introduce significant capacity enhancements at the bottlenecks. Book suggests using “simple actions such as ensuring that a capacity-constrained work center will not stay idle during lunch-break or shift changes, and offloading work to less efficient work centers that have ample excess capacity (p. 359).” I can build upon this suggestion and introduce off-shore IT team working “ten-hour shift schedule” to offset the costs and still providing around the clock 24*7 crucial IT support for the global digital supply chain. Also, this continuous production improvement process requires on-going attention and remediation strategy implementation and attentive manager to evaluate if remediation strategy has worked and/or if it requires any changes. Because systems’ bottleneck can “move,” if we increased the capacity at existing bottleneck, then other “bottlenecks” can be found at different place in the same department or in other departments, creating entirely “new” bottleneck. The main goal of management should be to utilize ongoing improvement policy to stay on track with the company’s long-term money-making

" Pittsburgh's strategic location and wealth of natural resources spurred its commercial and industrial growth in the 19th century. A blast furnace, erected by George Anschutz in 1792, was the forerunner of the iron and steel industry that for more than a century was the city's economic mainstay; by 1850 it was known as the "Iron City." The Pennsylvania Canal and the Portage Railroad, both completed in 1834, opened vital markets for trade and shipping. After the American Civil War, great numbers of European immigrants swelled Pittsburgh's population, and industrial magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Thomas Mellon built their steel empires there. The city became the focus of historic friction between labor and management, and the American Federation of Labor was born there in 1881."

With the twinning program established by ArcelorMittal, the struggling Burns Harbor Mill was paired with a stronger

The Goal is a novel, written by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox in 1984 with the purpose to spread awareness of Goldratt’s ideas about the production line and cost-cutting. In 1979 (5 years prior to “The Goal”), Goldratt and Creative Output, inc. worked to produce production scheduling software that would, in theory, cut lead time and inventories, and therefore cut costs. The software is called “OPT” (Optimized Production Technology”, and this is exactly what Goldratt was trying to spread awareness of with his book, “The Goal”.

The Theory of Constraints presupposes the existence of at least one constraint, or bottleneck, in every production system (Goldratt & Cox, 2008; Izmailov, 2014; Naor et al., 2012; Robbins, 2011; Tulasi & Rao, 2012). The TOC hypothesis suggests a five-step process for dealing with a bottleneck and its effect on the production system: identify the system’s constraint; decide how to exploit the system’s constraint; subordinate everything else to step two; elevate the system’s constraint; and, if in the previous steps a constraint has been broken, go back to step one, but do not allow inertia to cause a system’s constraint