Hawkesbury Cabinets Pty Ltd Planning and Scheduling

Question: Discuss about the Hawkesbury Cabinets Pty Ltd for Planning and Scheduling. Answer: Introduction Hawkesbury Cabinets Pty Ltd is started in Sydney in 2008 to meet the needs of Chinese community in the Hawkesbury. It designs and manufactures the customized kitchen cabinets. However, Due to their credibility and high quality products, they started getting more and more orders. These orders are mix of customized as well as demand for standard kitchen cabinets by the builders in small batches. However, with increase in orders, there is huge pressure on the manufacturing facility as the facility and layouts are designed initially thinking of servicing the customized orders. That is the reason, they are having the product layout which is suitable for manufacturing of low volumes of products. As the facility is not designed according to the large number of orders they are receiving, currently organizations is grappling with the number of operational issues like too much work in process and finished good inventory, increase in lead time, reducing profit margins. Moreover, the entire syst em is working at its capacity and there is also no planning of breakdown of any resource. This industry has a huge potential for the growth and the inflection point has come for the Hawkesbury Cabinets. It has become very critical now for them to list down all the issues they are facing and analyze the situation and takes appropriate steps to respond to the growing needs of the market in order to maintain their credibility and reputation (Khanna, 2015). The objective of this essay is to discuss the current production systems and operations of the Hawkesbury Cabinets and the issues they are facing as they are witnessing a change in their order booking which was purely customized once a time now changed to a mix of customized and standard orders. This essay will discuss how these production and operational issues at tactical level can impact the organizations financial structure and other broad organizations issues like credibility and quality. Analysis Hawkesbury Cabinets was started as a small manufacturing company to meet the needs of Chinese community with the focus on designing and manufacturing the custom-made kitchen cabinets. As initially focus was more on manufacturing customized products, Hawkesbury designed their facility in a process layout fashion in which cutting tables and saws are in one section, shapers and routers in another section and lathes machine and other less frequently used machines in their own section away from the work area. However, there is very high demand for manufacturing standard cabinets and this existing plant layout is not very supportive for standard products (Canes, Willaimson, 2013). It works better for manufacturing customized products. Hence, Hawkesbury must think in this direction if their layout is in alignment of their strategy. Another issues is with the scheduling algorithm used by the organization. Profit margins is the only criteria to schedule the various jobs in the facility. Though scheduling by profit margin does make sense here but it should not be the only criteria (Dauzere-Peres, Lasserre, 2012). For instance, reducing the work in process and finished good inventory should be another aim of the scheduling algorithms. Scheduling algorithm should schedule jobs in such a way that if jobs is started, it should not be left in between replaced by another jobs unless there is a hot order (Mok, Cheung, Wong, Leung, Fan, 2013). Their current strategy has led to huge increase in work in process inventory and also impacting the lead time of standard cabinets. Also, Currently Hawkesbury manufactures the high quality finished products with each product irrespective of whether it standard product or customized product has to be processes by same equipment by same set of people. In this scenario, there can be any bottleneck resource before which inventory is getting clogged up (Costas, Ponte, Fuente, Pino, Puche, 2015). Same has to be analyze and appropriate measure should be taken. Also, there should also be a plan how the manufacturing will be handled in case of breakdown of any machine. As the manufacturing capacity is working at its full capacity, such measures are very critical. Also, Standard products are also getting processes by same set of people means organization is not utilizing the full talent of the people. Standard products can be automated or at least dependence of people should be reduced or new people with low skills can also work on the standard products thus increasing the availability of key craftsmen to work on the cust omized product (Tassey, 2014). Manufacturing of standard cabinets have impacted the operations adversely as it lead to increase in inventory, jobs started but left in between and also effected the delivery and lead time of the standard products. Improper order promising dates can be another issue here if organization is promising aggressive ship dates to customers and then struggling to meet them. The companys decision to include standard cabinets can have a negative impact on the financials of the company in a short term because of the poor readiness. Company is not ready at to handle increased inflow of customer orders. There are operational issues which are also creating reduced margins and increased costs. Huge money is invested in inventory making cash to cash cycle time large impacting the cash flow of the company (Dasgupta, Yan, 2015). However, the companys decision to include standard cabinets will definitely be very positive step in a long term as it will help the company to grow and increase its revenue once the company is stabilized. There is also small possibility that company may lose it niche in manufacturing customized cabinets and market started perceiving its approach is confusing in targeting between standard and customized markets. The move to manufacture standard cabinets will really prove profitable to company provided the cost, quality and delivery are n ot at all compromised. Conclusion The above essay discusses the various problems faced by the Hawkesbury in their operation as it started receiving large number of standard orders. It discusses how the increase in inventory/improper management of inventory is a real issue which is giving rise to many other issues. The root cause of all the problems in increases in inventory (ALcaraz, Maldonado, Iniesta, Robles, Hernandez, 2014). Once it is managed, remaining things like profit margins will automatically fall in place. It also discusses the financial impact of such issues however once all this is overcome, the long term impact of huge inflow orders will be positive on the balance sheet of the company. This essay has refrain from making any suggestions about how to overcome the problems rather it focuses on the analyzing the current issues and their cascading effect that will simply create more issues in the organization. References Alcaraz, J. L. G., Maldonado, A. A., Iniesta, A. A., Robles, G. C., Hernndez, G. A. (2014). A systematic review/survey for JIT implementation: Mexican maquiladoras as case study. Computers in Industry, 65(4), 761-773. Canen, A. G., Williamson, G. H. (2013). Facility layout overview: towards competitive advantage. Facilities. Costas, J., Ponte, B., de la Fuente, D., Pino, R., Puche, J. (2015). Applying Goldratts Theory of Constraints to reduce the Bullwhip Effect through agent-based modeling. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(4), 2049-2060. Dasgupta, S., Li, E. X., Yan, D. (2015). Inventory behavior and financial constraints: Theory and evidence. Dauzre-Pres, S., Lasserre, J. B. (2012). 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