The Goal

1. Throughput- the rate at which the system generates money through sales
Inventory- all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell
Operational expense- all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput
2. Lou doesn’t have anything on inventories by part number because that is not his area. His job is financial data. Stacy manages the inventories in the plant. This is a problem because when management makes inventory decisions based on financial data they do not communicate and know what each other’s sides are doing. The sales are not high enough but inventory keeps on ordering more things because they are not working close to the other groups in the plant.
3. To increase the efficiency in the robots, Stacy released more materials to the floor in all areas, giving the robots more to produce. Although it increased the robots efficiency, I think it was a very bad idea because they are producing way more then they need. Instead of making costs go down they are going up because now they have to store the extra parts that keep piling up.
4. Lou says that the market determines that value of the product and I think he is right from the discussion we had in class. The value of the product must be greater then the price so consumers will want to buy it. If the market does not like the product then the value will go down.
5. Jonah thinks that a plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient because there are so much excess inventories and you can only get excess inventories if there is excess manpower. For this plant, I agree with Jonah. They are producing so much stuff that is not getting shipped which is making the plant loose money. If the demand was high, I think having people work around the clock would be very efficient but in this case at UniCo it is not.
6. Two phenomena’s that are found in every plant are dependent events and statistical fluctuations. A dependent event...