CBF has hired you to help determine why they are not able to produce the 1,000 boards per day.

1. What type of process flow structure is CBF using?

The company is using a batch shop process flow structure. CBF, Inc. bases its board fabrication process on the average job size or on its typical order. This means that the company proceeds with the manufacturing process in batches so as to meet the specific requirements per order. The typical contract that the company currently gets is 60 boards per order. However, due to persisting factory defects, they manufacture a total of 75 boards per batch in order to compensate for 20% of the boards that they typically reject during the process.

2. Diagram the process in a manner similar to …show more content…

This translates to a total of 20% rejection/defect rate that happens in the whole process. In other words, for every 10 boards manufactured, 2 are scrapped out.

In order to meet the average order size, at least 120% of the orders should be started into the manufacturing process because along the way, 20% of those that went into production get rejected. In the case, an average job size is 60 boards. This means that fabrication should start with at least 120% of 60, which is 72 boards. After the whole manufacturing process, each batch will end up with 60 boards that have passed the inspection and final testing.

On a daily production schedule, the impact is much larger. It can be seen from the computations in #3 that the average daily output is 900 boards, which is already less than the required output of 1,000 boards. Moreover, due to the expected 20% defect rate, the production team is left with even less, at 720 boards, which is much less than the required output. Therefore, CBF is forced to really measure up and produce a lot more to give way to the expected defects. To be able to meet the required 1,000 boards at the end of the day, they must start with 1,200 boards into production. However, 200 boards or 20% defect rate is not a good sign. There may be something wrong in the system, or maybe the quality control of the boards supplied to them, aside from the bottlenecks and the different capacities of the