Itm 601 - Advanced Business Process Methods

ITM 601 – Advanced Business Process Methods

Prof Helend Chen

Assignment 1: Case analysis, Custom Molds, Inc,

Textbook Page 115 - Page 116.

Winter 2016

Student:

Furqan Muhammad

050635317

1st February 2016

Please discuss the different competitive priorities, process choices and production & inventory strategy for custom designed moulds and part production.

Custom Molds Inc, founded by father-and-son team of Tom and Mason Miller In 1987, manufactures custom-designed molds and customer-made plastic connectors for the electronics industry. Custom Molds competitive priorities include the following:

• Top Quality: Custom Molds Inc reputation increased in the industry as a designer and fabricator of precision molds because of its consistent high-quality of its plastic parts. Hence for Custom Molds Inc, quality is a competitive priority as it has to maintain consistent high quality of its products while maintaining the customer requirements to stay ahead of its competition in the industry.
• On Time Delivery: As we see from the case, Custom Molds Inc has published turnaround times for all of its products and processes and hence must meet these timelines to maintain customer satisfaction and to increase the sales. Currently, Custom Molds has published lead time of nine weeks for delivery of custom-fabricated molds which is pretty competitive in the custom-designed plastic molds industry. Furthermore, the advertised lead time for producing parts not requiring fabricated molds is three weeks. To stay competitive, Custom Molds has to deliver the products and goods to the customer within the time frame it promises.
• Variety: One of the other competitive priority for Custom Molds is in the variety of its processes. Custom Molds can not only offer it’s customers fabrication of custom molds but it can also produce and assemble plastic parts for its customers too. This variety and end-to-end solution is also a competitive advantage for Custom Molds and it needs to maintain this a competitive priority.
• Volume Flexibility: Custom Molds Inc can handle orders for one molds all the way to multiple molds order of ten quantities. Furthermore, for manufacturing and supplying plastic parts, Custom Molds Inc can handle order sizes of as low as 50 to as high as 5,000. This volume flexibility of accelerating and decelerating the rate of production depending on the customer’s order gives Custom Molds Inc a competitive advantage as well and they need to maintain this as a competitive priority to stay ahead in the industry.

Custom Molds Process structure is as follows:

• Hybrid Office: Custom Molds Inc can be identified as having a hybrid office since Custom Molds Inc has moderate levels of customer contact (it interacts with customer to finalize the specifications for molds, when it needs approval for the mold design, and when it needs approval on the mold sample).
• Process: Custom Molds Inc can be identified as having job process for its fabricating molds process (since very limited and highly customized molds are produced for different customers) and having small batch process for producing plastic parts process (since only a limited customized parts order are produced and stored at any given time).
• Inventory: Custom Molds Inc uses Make-To-Order inventory stragety for its custom molds fabrication process because each order is unique and it doesn’t know of the requirements beforehand. On the other hand, it uses Make-To-Stock inventory strategy for its plastic parts production process since it needs to stock some molds to produce the plastic parts.
• Customer involvement: Custom Molds Inc has low customer involvement. It only interacts with customers at the initial stage of receiving the order, finalizing the specifications and design of the molds and approving the mold sample). While for the manufacturing of the plastic parts, the customer involvement is even less since it only interacts with the customers initially on receiving the order and after delivering the order to receive payments.
• Resource flexibility: The resources at Custom Molds Inc are identified as flexible workforce since they are cross-trained in different departments and can move and help other departments to clear bottlenecks (as can be seen from the case).

Please analyze demand pattern and market trend for mold and parts, you must base your discussion and conclusion on data given in case. You may use diagram & charts to support your analysis.

We can see from the case study that the demand for molds and parts has been constantly changing over the past few years. Before 1990, Electronics manufactures were manufacturing their own plastic connectors to save time and costs. This trend was changing however in 1990s and these electronic manufactures began developing strategic partnerships with reliable part suppliers to source high quality and cost effective parts within the short turnaround time.

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