Maui Sandal Case Study

It is my recommendation that Shuzworld change their facilities layout to create a better workflow. You can accomplish this by breaking the current structure and reorganizing the workstations to accomplish tasks in a more time efficient manner and maximizing an employees’ time spent on the product. Utilizing the Case Study we can surmise that each eight hour shift must produce forty-eight work boots. 8 hours times 60 minutes equals 480 minutes. 480 minutes (The Work Shift) divided by 48 (the number of work boots required) equals 10. One work boot must be completed in 10 minutes to meet production goals. Let’s take a look at the steps involved in making a work boot so analyze where we can cut production times.

Shuzworld's Rugged Wear

| Tasks | Completion (Minutes) | Predecessors |

A | 10 | None |

B | 6 | A |

C | 3 | A |

D | 8 | B,C |

E | 3 | D |

F | 4 | D |

G | 3 | E,F |

H | 9 | G |

Total time | 46 |

Both Table 1 and Figure 1 provide information of tasks associated with the production of the work boot. The workflow diagram in Figure 1 shows that some tasks are parallel, and others are sequential. In other words, some tasks can start together, and others cannot start unless the previous task is completed. Table 1 shows that the task A takes 10 minutes to complete; it is the longest task in this schedule. The production line consumes 46 minutes to complete all tasks. It produces 6 boots in an hour and maintains 40-hour per week work schedule.

The plant’s operation director, Alistair Wu wants to find out how to optimize tasks from A to H, described in the Table 1 and Figure 1. The concept implies that the tasks within the assembly line must be assigned to meet the production rate while minimizing the idle time. This method is called Balancing the assembly line. Balancing the assembly line method uses the following strategies: shortest operation time, least number of the following task, longest operation time, most following tasks, and ranked positional weight. The number of tasks that require balancing dictates the assembly line balancing framework. In Szuzworld’s case, the framework uses the following constraints:

• The shortest cycle time cannot be lower than 10 minutes;

• The entire cycle time must not be longer than 46 minutes.

Answer to question A 1a. The solution is achieved using POM software. Table 2 and 3 show corresponding input and output of assembly line balancing for the rugged work boot.

Table 2.

Input Data

|Task A 2. |

|TASK |

|Station |Task |

|1 |5 units |

|2 |5+10=15 units |

|3 |15+15=30 units |

|4 |30+20=50 units |

B. New Sandal Line

I have gathered the relevant information provided and estimated the cost of producing the new line of sandals. There is a learning curve of 80% according to the information from Shuzworld and the expectations for production are aggressive. The sandals are prepared in groupings of 10,000. The first month will have 5 groupings produced utilizing 1000 hours of labor billed at $1.08 an hour. The goal is to have the groupings increase by 5 every month for three months. To help calculate the cost of production to meet these goals I’ve used the coefficient approach. The initial 5 groupings that are required in month 1 will cost $4,035.96 using 3,737 labor hours to complete. Looking at these numbers and applying the learning curve it will take around 4,775 labor hours to manufacture ten groupings of the footwear in the second month, a cost of $5,154.62. The third month will take around 5,511 for fifteen groupings and it will come with a cost of labor around $5,950.10. The last month has around 6,102 hours of labor for twenty groupings equaling a cost of $6,590.16. These projects are made using the estimations provided in the Shuzworld report.

Continuing the Maui Sandal line will lower the costs of production per month based on the information above. The first month, the sandals will have a labor cost of $0.08 per unit, it is further reduced to $0.05 per unit in month