House Building Game Memo

Name_________Jianlan Chen__________________

Group__________Green__________________

Section #__________1__________________

Your Team
Your Role in Round 1
Green
Base Press

Round one
In round one, our team was separated into 8 roles: Production Control/Slitting, roof press, base press, roof fold, base subassembly, final assembly, quality control, and supervisor.
1. Production Control/Slitting: Cut the house paper into base and roof and send the two paper parts to roof press and base press through supervisor.
2. Roof press: Cut the roof paper and send the roof to roof fold through supervisor
3. Base press: Cut the base paper and send the base to bas subassembly through supervisor.
4. Roof fold: Fold the roof paper and send the roof to final assembly through supervisor.
5. Base subassembly: Fold the base paper and send the base to final assembly through supervisor.
6. Final assembly: Receive folded roof and base, and assemble them into a house, then send the house to quality control through supervisor.
7. Quality control: Receive house from final assembly and check the quality of the house, after checking, send qualified house to customer.
8. Supervisor: Transport finished part among the team but not allowed to participate the production.
9. Batch: Every batch has four houses/ house parts, finished parts won’t be sent to the next process until each batch is finished.
10. Location: Each process was not close to another, the supervisor had to run a long way to transport the parts.
In the first round, we are not allowed to proceed to next step until we finished the last step. And the base press seemed to be the bottleneck of the whole system. As the base press, I am the last one who received the first batch of four base in the first round among three teams, but we did better in batch two. The Cycle time was around 12 minutes and take time was about two and half minutes, and the whole process took 16 minutes. In my opinion, reasons caused inventories hold up is assigned distribution of labor and every part of the process didn’t cooperate so well. Most importantly, the number of labors were assigned to each procedures are equal, which directly caused inefficiency.

Redesign the process.
The first thing our group did is changing location, all process sat in the order, making things more efficient. We had two headcount this time to help any bottleneck occur in case. We also merged roof fold and base subassembly so that the roof fold, which cost most of the time in round one, can help base subassembly to finish their work.

Round two
I took responsibility of base press this time too and I sit right beside the slitting part.