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Rio Bravo IV - operations management case study

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Executive Summary:

Packard Electric Corp. is a leader in power and signal product distribution in the United States. They thought they could do the same thing outside of the US so they opened a plant in Juarez, Mexico to manufacture harnesses for US and other foreign customers. At the beginning, however their results were very poor. Probably, the most important issue was that none of the management had the necessary experience needed for their managerial positions and hardly anyone spoke Spanish. Also, the factory was very poorly equipped that could not compete with the lofty requirements of NUMMI - Packard's immediate customer. Packard was known for their high quality products but NUMMI's expectations were too high to satisfy. The first …show more content…

Create and train cross-departmental/organizational teams that would cooperate with each other to increase quality, flexibility, and service that support TQM and JIT

3. Implement cellular "U" shaped manufacturing layout to speed up the manufacturing process

Evaluation of Alternatives:

1.

Strengths:

Could improve productivity, quality, and safety

Could expand multi-process handling

The company could maintain low-cost automation (

Weaknesses:

Initial implementation could be expensive

It would require an outside expertise (costly)

It would probably require reorganization that might be time consuming and costly

2.

Strengths:

Encouraged communication would increase the speed of response time

Involvement of a third party (supplier, customer, logistics, etc...) would significantly improve the quality of service and Just-in-time processing

Cellular teams would encourage positive (enhanced) communication that would result in positive - intrinsic motivation and would broaden their skills and abilities

The product can be standardized and thus more effective manufacturing

Weaknesses:

If one department dominates other departments lose their motivation and their effort towards continuous improvement would be very low

Teamwork can sometimes be stressful and can create conflict that would 'damage' productive relationship between the departments

Competition amongst individual departments (between supplier and manufacturer, or logistics, or customer) would

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