Operations and Supply Chain Management 15th edition:
Circuit Board Fabricators, Inc. is a small manufacturer of circuit boards located in California near San Jose. Companies such as Apple Computer and Hewlett Packard use the company to make boards for prototypes of new products. It is important that CBF give quick and very high quality service. The engineers working on the new product are on a tight schedule and have little patience with sloppy work or missed delivery dates.
Circuit boards are a rigid flat surface where electronic components are mounted. Electronic components such as integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors, and diodes are soldered to the boards. Lines called "traces" are etched on the board and electronically connect the components. Since the electronic traces cannot cross, holes through the circuit board are used to connect traces on both sides of the boards, allowing complex circuits to be implemented. These boards are often designed with 40 or 50 components that are connected through hundreds of traces on a small four by six inch board.
CBF has developed a good business plan. It has four-standard size board configurations and has automated much of its process.for making these standard boards. fabricating the boards requires CBF's numerically controlled(NC) equipment to be programmed. This is largely an automated process that works directly from engineering drawings that are formatted using industry standard codes.
Currently, the typical order is for 60 boards. Engineers at customer companies prepare a computer-aided design (CAD) drawing of the board. This CAD drawing precisely specifies each circuit trace, circuit pass-through holes, and component mounting points on the board. An electronic version of the drawing is used by a CBF process engineer to program the NC machines used to fabricate the board.
Due to losses in the system, CBF has a policy of increasing the size of an order by 25 percent. For example, for a typical order consisting of 60 boards, 75 boards would be started through the process. Fifteen percent of the boards are typically rejected during an inspection that occurs early in the manufacturing process and another 5 percent of the remaining boards are rejected in the final test.
Answer the following questions in your Case Study. CBF hired you to help determine why it is not able to produce the 1,000 circuit boards per day.
1. What type of process flow structure is CBF using? What could other types of process flow structures have been used? Compare and contrast these structures and explain which method(s) would be feasible for use at CBF and which one would be best for CBF, if different from the structure CBF is currently using.
2. Analyze the capacity of the process. Are the capacities of all the processes/machines balanced? If some are not, which processes/machines are they and can you determine a cause for the imbalance?
3. What is the impact of the losses in the process in the inspection and final test?
4. List and fully explain the recommendations would you make for a short-term solution to CBF’s problems? How would you define “short-term solution” to CBF in terms of days or months?
5. What long-term recommendations would you make? Describe why these recommendations are different from your short-term solutions.