Blitz Case Write-up

Blitz Company is a manufacturer of electrical circuit boards. It specialises in making circuit

boards for experimental devices and pilot production units. The company is facing issues of
various types like delay in order delivery, return of products from customers, productivity
issues, issues with quality and the overall working methodology.
The problems being faced by the company are:
Production bottleneck- The problem arises at any stage of production depending on various
reasons. Some work stations are overloaded and some are sitting idle without any fixed
pattern. The reasons are orders requiring rework, change in design.
Performance and Methods- The standard man-hours did not include the time spent in rework,
time spent in shifting circuit boards between several stages of production. Whereas a
considerable chunk of time was being spent on these tasks. This somehow had an effect on
judging the performance of the workers. There was a lot of scope for improvement and the
working methodology was not ideal.
Quality - There were issues with the quality of the products being manufactured by the Blitz
Company. There were several instances when products were returned. Among such cases
there were 10% in which the products were damaged or out of tolerance and the rest 90%
were cases in which one or two operations were missed
Delivery The Company had a policy of clearing all the work possible out of the shop prior
to the end of the month. Within the first half the months very few deliveries were made, and
the orders piled up towards the end of the month which also included the products which
were returned back.
The factors contributing to this performance are:
a. Tasks of employees are not fixed
b. Employees interrupt their tasks 9-10 times a day for various reasons
c. On the shop floor various operations involved in the production are not located
according to the manufacturing sequence
d. Considerable time is wasted in delivering circuit boards between various work
stations.
e. Supervision is not effective as 90% of the products returned are those in which one or
two operations have been missed.
Following are my recommendations:
a. Location of various operations on the shop floor should be according to the sequence
of production.
b. A separate team of workers should be made responsible for moving circuit boards
between various stages of production.
c. A separate team should be formed to handle the products that are returned, thereby
reducing the burden on the primary workers.

d. Supervision and quality check should be made stricter and there should be different
persons responsible for each of them.
e. The blueprints should be checked more thoroughly and any problems which might
arise should be tackled.
f. The delay between getting the order and start of production should be reduced.
Currently there is a lag of almost a week between getting the order from costumer and
starting the actual process of production.