Swift Company - Design for Supply

Design for Supply

Maulik Patel

Maulik.patel@westburne.ca

Module-1

The Swift Company manufactures Duro. A Duro is a Plastic table, meant mainly for outdoor use at cottages and so forth. It is quite sturdy, as it is made of one solid piece of strong white plastic, about 1” thick. It measures 3 feet X 2 Feet and is 2 feet high. Duros come in many unique combinations. Customer have to choose in between 8 types of footpads, 4 type of trim, and 5 type of decorative top patterns so customer have 160 possible combinations of Duros.

At this time Process of supplying Duros is as follows

1. Customer place order for Duros and expect almost instant delivery or within 2 hours of placing the order

2. After placing an order the unit are picked from inventory at the Swift Warehouse, loaded on delivered directly to the Customer

At this time Process of Manufacturing and shipping to Warehouse as per below

1. Raw material are received at Swift from Suppliers

2. One of the eight types of Footpads are attached to each leg than one of the four types of trim is added

3. The tables are than stacked in a truck for shipment to finish plant at the other side of city. Shipment will take 90 min

4. When trucks arrive at Swift finishing plant, the workers unload the tables, read the affixed instruction sheets, glue the specified decorative top pattern on clear plastic backing and than glue the backing on each table top

5. Workers than insert each finished table into a box, close it label it and load it another truck and shipped to swift’s finished good warehouse. This will also take another 90 minutes

6. Swift keeping an average of 10 unit of each option of Duros in finish goods

At this time the Swift face 3 main problem in his company and it is

1. Higher supply chain cost

2. Longer lead time in production

3. Higher inventory

The Swift has 2 hours delivery requirement to meet their Customer service level

To solve above problem I will recommend below solution

At this time company has 2 different Manufacturing facilities (Main Plant, Finishing Plant) and one Finishing Good Warehouse. All three facilities are at three different places. Company manufacturing process divided