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Improving organizational productivity and quality are issues that have been showing for some time and will continue to be important to any business and production organization. All types of organizations need to be as productive as possible to best utilize their important resources, to meet the needs and demands of their consumers, and to stay competitive with similar business organizations. In today’s fast-changing and dynamic way of life, many organizations come up with different strategies and ideas to improve and develop their products. The development of science and technology has led to the improvement of many companies in terms of product development and research. The use of technology has become an essential part of the strategies of companies to increase production and to check the quality of the product. Similarly, with the role of technology in their development and growth, companies can properly evaluate the performance of their employees and the opinions of their consumers regarding their products. As such, this case study aims to discuss and analyze the problems of the Tika Bika Company. It also shall provides recommendations or possible solutions for the problems to be discussed based on the situation and the concepts in operations management.
Problems of the Tika Bika Company
As reported, the Tika Bika Company manufactures printed circuit boards to the specifications of its different customers, the electronic manufacturers. It employs new designs and prototype production techniques that enable the company to become more adept in anticipating and resolving the problems of its consumers, over its competitors. However, despite the effective maintenance of the company’s workers over its operations, several problems have been encountered in sustaining the operations of the company, which become the source of its loss of profit and sales. The problems identified and described by President of Tika Bika include problems related to operations, productivity, quality and delivery.
Primarily, the operation of the company is declining, due to production bottleneck. The shifting of workload from one operation to another without pattern causes this bottleneck. The company is having a hard time anticipating the workload pile up in the shop daily because individual orders from clients impose varying workloads on each operation. The variation in the workload depends upon the differences in the size of the order that bypass some operations and from the differences in circuit designs. In addition, the company entertains four-day rush orders, which require rework at one or two operations, thus, delaying the process of delivering artwork modifications of a client. This is because the company’s workers are shifted from one work operation to another depending on the demand of the operation. In this sense, some workstations are left vacant, while some workstations are overloaded. Moreover, disturbance in the operations of the company is may be attributed to telephone calls from the customer’s engineers who had encountered a design problem. As a result, the customer would be requiring redesigning and rework on the products. For the past months, the company’s supervisor, Raghib Alameh, has been having a hard time predicting work pile up or run out daily, thus, resulting to the continuous transfer of workers from one workstation to another. This problem is only encountered in the production of bulk orders, while in short orders, with eight circuit boards or less, a senior employee, Ahmed Hreibeh does the work alone successfully.
Another problem of the company can be encountered in terms of its productivity, as some machines are left idle more often that expected. Another source of this problem is that the standard labor hours do not include time spent in reworking parts that have failed inspection or have been returned by clients. In addition, the time used for moving from one station to another adds to the idle time used by workers, thus, further lessening their time for production. Mr. President also believes that the job strategies used in the company are far from ideal, thus, not reflecting improvements in its operations. This leads to the realization that operations and productivity method improvements are not being implemented due to the pressure for output, the constant shifting of workers from one job to the next, and in inhibiting experimentation with new ideas. Furthermore, the introduction and implementation of new ideas and methods has led to further confusion, as the increase in the production of a particular station resulted to the piling up of work in another, thus, rescheduling orders and reassigning workers. This further impeded the productivity of the company.
Aside from operations and productivity problems encountered, the company also encounters problems and failures in maintaining the quality standards of products and in meeting promised delivery dates.
The company’s sales manager, Lloyd Searby reported that since August, the company has been receiving customer returns, which increased from under one percent to about 3%, and delay in product delivery, which averaged 9 days late. This would result to the continuous loss of sales, as the company’s competitors are able to promise four-week deliveries on small orders. In addition, the company fails to inspect the quality of their products more effectively, thus, resulting to increase in returns and reprocessing. The problem occurs as the president feels that a more strict inspection system would not be possible, as product standards vary from customer to another and from one order to another. In September, the company’s preshipment reject rates increased, resulting to a 6% total loss due to incomplete operations and subsequent reworking and reprocessing of circuit boards. Moreover, due to the delay of production and the increase in the reworking of products, the company has fewer shipments, with actual deliveries delayed with an average of 9 days. This forced the company to hire an addition of eight employees assigned in the production force. However, it would still take some time before making the additional employees skilled in the business. (From “”, 1998)
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