(Demetrios Boutsikakis, Elena Brown, Michael Duffy, Jay Wassum, 2000)
The Nokia manufacturing facility in Fort Worth TX would like for us to help them improve their manufacturing process. We have met with Ron Page, manufacturing manager, Jas Kirkwood and Walt Meyer, industrial engineers, and have discussed with them helping their facility reconfigure their existing packaging process. The main goal of the project is to increase Units Per Man Hour (UPMH) in the packaging department.
The factory has three departments: manufacturing, packaging, and shipping, but we are only going to concentrate on the packaging department activities. The packaging department has noticed that they run an inefficient operation. In addition, they haven't had the time or personnel to detect and fix the inefficiencies. They measure their production units by UPMH. The most recent level was 26 with a projected goal of 36-40. However, due to cost-cutting necessities they moved some of the operations to Korea and Mexico. In effect, new personnel have come in during the past couple of weeks.
In order to reduce their inefficiencies our team has been observing the packaging process and has gathered time study data accordingly. We have picked to study the evening shift that is a 12-hour shift, from 6 pm to 6 am. On the evening shift there are three package processing lines to be studied. Using the gathered data we are going to create a simulation using the ProModel software that runs on the SEAS server.