As a result of globalization the demands on electronic manufacturing
services have risen, as they should be able to compete with the low
manufacturing costs that exist in the former Soviet states and in China.
The customer gradually demands increased price cuts on products that
already exist in volume production and, furthermore, the production of new
products is increasingly committed to countries with cheap labour costs.
To compete in this globalized market the electronic manufacturing service,
which will be referred to as the Company, identified their prototyping and
industrialization process as a future order winner. Even if this segment is
a small part of the Company's revenue, the Company has recognized that the
process is a means of gaining entry to future production orders.
This study has had the purpose of identifying areas of improvement in the
Company's industrialization process. Beyond this identification, the study
should also present tangible and viable recommendations to improve the
process.
The study has been performed as a case study and several means of gathering
information have been used in this study i.e. literature studies,
interviews, observations, the 7 management tools and questionnaires. In the
study, eight problem areas were identified. These ranged from the fact that
the preseries was not produced in the desired way due to exchanges of
suppliers after or during the industrialization project, to faults in the
steering of materials and production resources.
Through the analysis, the authors managed to identify the deficient
steering of materials in the industrialization process as the problem that
the company considered most severe. To solve this problem the study has
resulted in two tangible suggestions that should enable the Company to
lessen the occurrence of this problem.
The first of these suggestions was the introduction of a scrap-factor
during purchasing in the industrialization process. This factor should
create a buffer that would deal with the component losses that occur in the
different production cycles due to process faults, kitting faults, handling
faults and so on.
The second suggestion represents an identification, classification and
inventory of the components that are critical to the project. Through this
method one should be able to increase awareness amongst the production
personnel of how important some of the components are. Furthermore, the ERP-
system, and thereby the industrialization project, would be up to date if
an inventory of these critical components was performed after each
produ...
