Improving late delivery performance: a study of rochdale spears ltd, company

Abstract

In today‘s scenario, delivering product to the customers at the shortest possible time is a challenge for all the manufacturing industries. In typical manufacturing organizations, functional units have their own goals. As there is no single functional unit responsible for on-time delivery, in traditional organizations on-time delivery has received minimal attention. An important feature of the conventional wisdom of make to order (MTO) manufacturing has been that if a plant‘s management wishes to achieve good delivery performance they need to quote a long lead time. The long lead times give them the ability to plan production effectively and achieve high levels of delivery performance. However, it has been reported that the reverse situation occurs, namely manufacturing plants quoting short customer lead times were, in fact, achieving much better delivery performance than those plants that quoted long lead times (Szwejczewski et al. 1997). Although this topic has received considerable attention in the literature, most of the articles are restricted by their limited approach concerned primarily with the effect of various delivery date assignment methods. Manufacturing is an integrated system covering everything from order receipt through to the product shipment (Hitomi 1991). It covers a wide range of activities in many functional areas including planning and design, purchasing, production, inventory, distribution, marketing and sales. On-time delivery or lead time cannot be dealt with in isolation. In order to make any realistic and sustained improvement in (on time delivery) OTD performance, the whole manufacturing planning, control and execution cycle and associated systems have to be taken into consideration. Realising the importance of such an approach, this study proposes a model to improve on-time delivery performance through business process model integrating two common processes involved in manufacturing planning, control and execution cycle for MTO situations and a database for supporting various functional applications through basic and transaction data. The proposed model was implemented through Rochdale Spears Ltd, company. The rest of the paper is organised as follows. First, a review of the company background as well as current problems that company is facing. Next, the proposed improvement solutions are presented, followed by a section on a systematic investigation of the on time delivery problems and implementation of the solutions to overcome the problems in Rochdale Spears company. Finally, research findings and conclusions are drawn.