Management and the Technology Professional – B302

Case study answer 2

By using critical path analysis I have been able to deduce that the failure in step 6 will require more time and resources to account for the mistake in testing. Due to the nature of processor production a failure at this step will cause malfunctioning products when configuring at step 7. Production of processors is highly cash intensive and requires productivity of the highest standard. I’ll decided upon the action I want to proceed with based on the time lost in production and increased cost in making the product by the possible avenues to ensure the testing has been fully completed.

To get and engineer in to reconfigure the testing machines for the single test in the final testing stage and run the required test again in can cost the company more in the overall cost of production than the production lead time. Although this action would extend the longest time on the critical path by one to two days, the loss financial to a heavily cash intensive area of the business makes option unviable because of the increased overall production cost.

Repeating the testing stage is another avenue to look into as its benefits are the checking of internal procedures and testing techniques. This can be used as an exercise into the performance at this stage and offer relative knowledge into the operational side of my area. This would require overtime and larger loads for a short period of time to recoup the fall back in production but this is a marginal cost to above proposal with an engineer re configuring the machinery to perform that one test. However this does have fall backs of the loss in the production lead time and increased critical path when applied to this product production life cycle. This action would incur less cost but longer time to completion. The company however benefits from the outcome due to the review of operational techniques.

As the supervisor for step 6, I have to take responsibility for the error in testing and shall impose adjusted testing procedures so that problem does not arise again. It is important to make the right reaction to the mistakes in my department. My actions to repeat the testing step has come at a cost in lead time production however due to the nature of this intensive method, I feel that the renewed procedures will help in the future so that mistakes can be avoided. I accept that these actions have come at the expense to the company and sort to view my area of production more thoroughly to avoid this problem and similar errors in the future.

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