MT209 Unit 4 Operations Review Example

Eleven Days for Three and a Half Hours of Printing: A Unit 4 Operations Review of a Screen Printing Shop

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT209: Small Business Management

Unit 4 Operations Review

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Northfork Print and Stitch, the order, its customer and every figure are composite and illustrative; bracketed figures stand where the shop's records would supply the numbers; the sources cited are real.

Why Follow One Order

The owner believes the shop's limit is the automatic press, because the press is visibly full in September. Following one order from start to finish tests that belief with evidence. Womack and Jones (2003) recommended mapping the value stream of a single product family, recording every step from order to delivery and separating the steps that add value from those where the product simply waits. A team shirt order is a good choice because it is the shop's most common fall job, and because school orders arrive with a fixed deadline, a game or a meet, so any delay matters to the customer.

The Order

On a Tuesday in mid-September, a middle school cross-country coach emailed asking for 144 shirts in two colors with the school logo on the front and the season's meet schedule on the back, needed for the conference meet in three weeks. I followed the order through the shop's email, the order board and conversations with the owner and the senior press operator.

The Process Map

The order passed through nine steps. For each, I recorded working time, the minutes someone actually spent on it, and waiting time, the days it sat before the next step began.

Inquiry to quote took two working days. The owner read the email on Tuesday but wrote the quote at her kitchen table on Wednesday night, as she does with most quotes in the fall. Working time was about thirty minutes.

Quote to approved artwork took three working days. The coach approved the price on Thursday but wanted the logo larger and a different font for the meet schedule. Three rounds of emailed proofs followed, each answered by the coach after practice, usually the next day. Working time on the art was about ninety minutes in total.

Blank garment order to delivery took a day and a half. The owner ordered the shirts on Monday morning from the regional warehouse, and they arrived Tuesday afternoon.

Screen preparation took one afternoon, about three hours of an operator's time, including coating, exposing and taping two screens for the front and one for the back.

The order then waited two working days for a gap in the press schedule, because larger high school orders were ahead of it.

Printing and curing took about three and a half hours on the automatic press, including setup, two color passes on the front and one on the back.

Folding, counting by size and bagging took about an hour. The order waited half a day for the owner to write the invoice, and the coach picked it up the next afternoon.

What the Map Shows

Of eleven working days, the press and curing accounted for under half a day. The largest waits came before production began: two days for a quote and three days for art approval. Together those five days were spent waiting for the owner's desk or the customer's reply, not for any machine. The two-day wait for the press was real, but smaller than the delays before it.

Hopp and Spearman (2008) explained that in any production system, the time a job spends waiting in queues usually far exceeds the time it spends being processed, and that reducing queues often matters more than speeding up machines. The cross-country order is a small example of that principle.

The press took three and a half hours; the owner's desk and the coach's inbox took five days.

Capacity Through the Year

The automatic press runs at about [90] percent of available hours in September and under [40] percent in February, according to the shop's job log. That confirms the owner's view that the press is busy in the fall. Goldratt and Cox (2004) built their theory of constraints on the idea that one bottleneck caps the whole operation, so an hour saved anywhere else changes nothing at the end of the day. If the press were the only constraint in September, orders would move quickly through quoting and art and then pile up at the press. Instead, they pile up before the press, at the owner's desk.

The press still matters. In the last two weeks of September, it became the constraint as well, with orders waiting up to four days. But for most of the fall, the desk constrains the shop first.

The Owner's Week

The interview in Unit 3 suggested that quoting happens late at night. Tracking one week in September confirmed it. The owner spent about [18] hours on quotes, art proofs and approval emails, most of it after the shop closed. She also spent about twelve hours on the press floor covering for an operator. Every hour on the press was an hour not spent turning around quotes, which is why quotes took two days.

The week also showed how interruptions add up. Customers walking in to pick up orders, coaches calling with size changes and suppliers confirming deliveries broke her day into pieces of ten or fifteen minutes. Quoting a team order needs a block of half an hour with the garment catalog and the art file open, and the shop day rarely offered one. That is why the quotes moved to the evening, and why they arrived a day later than customers expected.

Findings

Three findings follow. First, most of the elapsed time on a typical order is waiting, and most of that waiting happens before production. Second, the owner's desk is the shop's main constraint for most of the fall, with the press becoming a second constraint only at the very peak. Third, the shop does not track how long quotes take or how many are lost, so the cost of slow quoting is invisible.

Recommendations

The shop should first protect the owner's time for quoting during the day, by not scheduling her on the press except in an emergency. It should build quote templates for its five most common team orders, which would cut quoting time on most jobs to about ten minutes. It should limit art changes to two rounds before an order is scheduled, and ask coaches to approve proofs by a set time. And it should begin a simple log of quotes sent and won, so the next review can measure what slow quotes cost. Unit 6 will examine whether hiring someone to handle quotes and approvals would relieve the constraint more than another press operator.

References

Goldratt, E. M., & Cox, J. (2004). The goal: A process of ongoing improvement (3rd rev. ed.). North River Press.

Hopp, W. J., & Spearman, M. L. (2008). Factory physics (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2003). Lean thinking: Banish waste and create wealth in your corporation (Rev. ed.). Free Press.