Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
production environment. There is one aspect to it. Whenever some maintenance is
done by development, the test case, automation script, and test data may have to
change. These activities are also carried out by the testing team.
For this scheme to work, a tight service level agreement framework will have to be
developed, implemented, and agreed upon by all parties. When the development plan
or test plan is done, it should be agreed upon by all stakeholders from all sides.
But, once in place, this can bring tremendous benefits to the customer.
12.. Mass Manufacturing
The outside view of mass manufacturing is essentially mass sourcing to reduce raw mate-
rial cost, and mass production to reduce the operation costs of manufactured goods.
Let us discuss mass manufacturing concepts. One characteristic is consolidation.
Using consolidation, one can reduce manufacturing costs by using resources that are
shared for all manufacturing activities. For instance, a good amount of resource pro-
cessing time is lost in setup and waiting for raw material to arrive. A specific machine
can process several types of goods. But machine setup has to change to start process-
ing another kind of goods. For example, a lathe machine is set up to process a certain
automobile part. After finishing a batch of these parts, the next batch of parts to be
processed is different from the parts in the first batch. So the lathe machine is set up to
process these parts now. It takes time to change the setup of a machine. Any machine
may need to change setup 10 to 12 times a day. If each setup requires on average 25
minutes, then in a single day the machine is not productive for more than 4 hours.
After processing each part, there is an idle time when the machine waits for the
next part to process. Suppose the machine processes 500 parts a day. The waiting
time for the next part to arrive at the machine is 30 seconds. So the machine is not
productive for more than 4 hours a day.
Now let us discuss one more problem faced by the manufacturing industry.
Suppose in the manufacturing process, goods are to be colored at one processing
step. Goods are to be colored as per the order. These colors can range from green,
red, blue, and darker colors to light colors. Generally when one batch of goods is
colored with the same color, the dye has to be changed to another color for the next
batch of goods. Generally, if cleaning of the machine is required to remove the color,
it takes 24 hours. If the previous color was a light color and the next batch of goods
requires a darker color, then this cleaning is not required. But if the previous color
was dark and now goods need a lighter color, then the machine has to be cleaned;
other wise the darker color will get smeared on this batch of goods and the goods will
get spoiled. For productivity reasons orders should be sorted and then manufactur-
ing planning should be done so that orders containing goods with lighter colors are
processed first. Next will be orders having goods with slightly darker colors. This
goes on until the darkest-colored goods are processed near the end of the manufac-
turing planning period. This technique is called
sequencing
of orders.
