Memo
To: Bert Padansky, Stonehaven’s Gdansk Plant Manager
From:
Date: Feburary 5th, 2015
Subject: Recommendations to improve the performance of Gdansk Factory

After having analyzed the plant operation three recommendations have been put forth to improve the performance of the plant. Since the performance of factory can be increased by improving the factory throughput efficiency, the suggestion are based on these improvements. Recommendation1. Reducing batch size
When the batch size of 100 pairs, the system runs at throughput efficiency about but a little change in the batch size can tremendously increase the throughput efficiency. If the size is reduced severely it can lead to lower utilization so the batch size should be reduced where the maximum throughput efficiency is possible Recommendation2. Cutting Department Setup Time Improvement
As the batch size decreases, the cutting department with long setup time will have greater effect on throughput time. So it is important to reduce setup time by either training workers to do job better or transfer the internal setup (setup with stopping the machine) into external setup (setup without stopping the machine) as much as possible. Here, we assume reduce one minute setup for all three machines. So the new setup time for machine1, 2, 3 will be 5.85mins, 5.75mins, 4.25mins accordingly. Plug in the new data; we can get the highest throughput efficiency of 40.06% (cell AZ17) with batch size of 30. Figure2 shows the improvement. Hence by doing so, we can not only reduce the throughput time but also improve the throughput efficiency. Recommendation3. Lasting Department Process Improvement
To further improve the system, we suggest re-design the process of lasting department. By changing the way of working, we hope the five stations can