Riordan Manufacturing Service Request
Riordan Manufacturing Inc. is an industry leader in plastic manufacturing. Founded in 1991, by Dr. Riordan, a chemistry professor possessing various patents regarding plastics processing, Riordan has established itself as the leader in polymer plastic research, development and manufacturing. Riordan has multiple manufacturing facilities located in both the U.S and China as follows:
• San Jose, CA '' corporate headquarters and research and development
• Pontiac, MI '' manufactures custom plastic parts
• Albany, GA '' manufactures plastic beverage containers
• Hangzhou, China '' manufactures plastic fan components
The Chief Operating Officer of Riordan Manufacturing requested that specified suggestions for changes in their current systems to improve their inventory management process be completed. In response, a broad review of Riordan’s current systems was conducted. (Cowgill, Davis, Hopple, Ivery, & Klein, 2006, pp. 1-3) The primary goal of this review was to identify areas and systems of Riordan Manufacturing that could be improved on to increase productivity, reduce redundancy, reduce development time life cycle, increase build to market times as well as provide Riordan Manufacturing with a substantial Return on Investment (ROI).
Riordan currently uses separate systems in each of these areas, at each facility. By using these different application packages across the company, Riordan is dependent on outsourcing of several vital company functions as well as needlessly paying employees countless hours of time in converting, re-entering data as required in each of the four locations. By conducting a system investigation and evaluating the desired results, identifying potential problems, providing solutions as well as possible cost savings and reduction in design to market times, Riordan Manufacturing will be better suited to serve their current and future customer base.
Currently, Riordan is outsourcing most information technology requirements to Smith Systems Consulting. During a summary review, areas have been identified for either upgrades or replacement as indicated below. As Riordan has grown and acquired other business units and business systems, they have inherited various systems that are not fully compatible with each other.
Employee motivation and rewards are effective means to retain employees. When an employee is motivated, his or her needs are being met. When an employee is unmotivated, his or her needs are not being met which results in a high employee attrition rate. Riordan Manufacturing is experiencing a high attrition rate. Riordan Manufacturing has 3 plants and employs 550 people. Recently, Riordan hired Human Capital Consulting to perform an analysis on the underlying issues that are causing the decreasing employee satisfaction and to recommend courses of action that will address the underlying issues. Research has been done to identify the issues and opportunities, the stakeholders and ethical dilemmas, and the end state vision. A gap analysis has also been performed to determine the gap between the current situation and the end state goals. Riordan Manufacturing will use this information to determine the best way to proceed towards improving its working environment for the employees.
Lowe’s is a home improvement warehouse that was founded in 1946 as a single store and since has grown to become the second largest in the world. As technology has evolved, Lowe’s has made many advances incorporating new systems and devices to stay competitive. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the information technology management systems used at Lowe’s. It will look at Porter’s Five Force Model, supply chain management; data base management system, five agent-based technologies, e-commerce and system development lifecycle. Furthermore, it will look at business continuity planning, emerging trends and security vulnerabilities relates to the organization to remain competitive.
In today’s operational management arena, there are certain expectations from a managerial aspect that must be met in order to be successful. A comprehensive look at the Space Age Furniture Company will show exactly what the Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) calculations are for this company at present time and then take the information given in order to properly suggest ways to improve the sub-assemblies. In addition, there will be an analysis on the trade-offs between the overtime and inventory costs. A calculation will be made on the new MRP that will improve the base MRP. This paper will also compare and contrast the types of production processing to include the job shop, batch, repetitive, or continuous, and determine which the primary mode of operation should be and exactly why. A detailed description on how management can keep track of the job status and location during production will also be addressed. Finally, there will be a recommendation on they type of changes that need to occur that will be beneficial to the company and at the same time add value to the customer. This paper will conclude with summary of the major points.
Riordan Manufacturing, a company that is wholly owned by Riordan Industries, a Fortune 1000 enterprise specializes in the field of plastic injection molding. Riordan Manufacturing was initially Riordan Plastics, Inc., a company founded by Dr. Riordan in 1991 to process polymers into high tensile strength plastic substrates. Due to its initial success and venture capital obtained, it was able to expand and take on a new identity hence the name change. Its products include plastic beverage containers produced at its plant in Albany, Georgia, custom plastic parts produced at its plant in Pontiac, Michigan, and plastic fan parts produced at its facilities in Hangzhou, China. The company's research and development is done at the corporate headquarters in San Jose. Riordan's major customers are automotive parts manufacturers, aircraft manufacturers, the Department of Defense, beverage makers and bottlers, and appliance manufacturers.
Although Riordan Manufacturing has a generic strategic direction, a comprehensive strategic plan reevaluation and development must occur after the move to China. Environmental scanning, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, evaluation, and control are fundamental to the creation of a strategic plan (Wheelen & Hunger, 2010). Because, strategic planning is integral to the corporate strategy and success of Riordan the board of directors' requesting Team B formulate a comprehensive strategic plan for their organization.
The current architecture of the Riordan Manufacturing Company Inc. Wide Area Network (WAN) and network security in place requires updated documentation. The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the existing information into a single format and evaluate the WAN and security documentation for an executive overview. Riordan Manufacturing, Inc. is an industry leader in the field of plastic injection molding. With state-of-the art design capabilities, they create innovative plastic designs that have earned international acclaim. Attention to detail, extreme precision and enthusiastic quality controls are the hallmarks of Riordan Manufacturing. With facilities in San Jose, California, Albany, Georgia, Pontiac, Michigan and Hangzhou, China, the company is heavily dependent upon their communication networks. The documentation produced by this analysis will give the management at Riordan Manufacturing an understanding of their current network topology and a baseline to evaluate security of the network.
University of Idaho. (2014). Information Technology Services: Appendix 1: ITS Analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Retrieved from http://www.uidaho.edu/its/strategic-plan/appendix-i.
Hardware, software, support and maintenance costs grow each year with multiple systems in each local region running different types of software and hardware. The application and hardware support teams are larger than could be possible with one integrated solution.
Since its release in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has impacted the manufacturing sector in the United States. Manufacturing organizations such as Custom Fabricators, Inc (CFI) have been forced to find ways to cut costs to remain competitive.
The furniture company Somerset needs to retain its customer service record and remedy any of its global supply chain issues before it has an adverse effect on the brand and start losing customers. With a frequent change in the product catalog, keeping an excessive inventory will cut its profit and some of the product may become obsolete even before the furniture hits the retail outlet stores. In order to achieve profit and success, business employee many strategies and the supply chain strategy are one of the operational management techniques that use analytical decision making process to achieve the company goals and provide tools to effectively compete in the market (Taylor and Russell, 2014).
According to Srinidhi and Tayi (2004), companies that are flexible enough and are able to change from a JIT system to a traditional inventory system will have a competitive advantage over other firms who do not switch. In such uncontrollable environments, the major benefit of JIT becomes a handicap with the increase in delivery times and the added data handling and coordination required in such times. This leads to a decrease in quick response time, which ultimately leads to increase in costs to the firm.
Inventory management is a method through, which a business handles tangible resources and materials to ensure availability of resources for use. It is a collection of interdisciplinary processes including a full circle from the demand forecasting, supply chain management, inventory control and reverse logistics. Inventory management is the optimization of inventories of manufactured goods, work in progress, and raw materials. According to Doucette (2001) inventory management can be challenging at times; however, the need for effective inventory management is largely seeing more as a necessity than a mere trend when customer satisfaction and service have become a prime reason for a business to stand apart from its competition. For example, Wal-Mart’s inventory management is one of the biggest contributors to the success of the company;
This is the activity carried out by organizations that own production sites, and their performance has a major impact on product cost, quality, speed of delivery and delivery reliability, and flexibility [8]. As it is quite an important part of the supply chain, production needs to be measured and continuously improved. Suitable metrics for the production level are as follows. Order lead-time, the total order cycle time, called order to delivery cycle time, refers to the time elapsed in between the receipt of customer order until the delivery of finished goods to the customer. The reduction in order cycle time leads to reduction in supply chain response time, and as such is an important performance measure and source of competitive advantage [9]. It directly interacts with customer service in determining competitiveness. Range of product and services: According to [8] a plant that manufactures a broad product range is likely to introduce new products more slowly than plants with a narrow product range. Plants that can manufacture a wide range of products are likely to perform less well in the areas of value added per employee, speed and delivery reliability. This clearly suggests that product range affects supply chain performance. Effectiveness of scheduling techniques is another important measure of supply chain effectiveness. Scheduling refers to the time or date on or by which
To ensure Tektronix's success, the ERP implementation was divided into five manageable sub-groups: (1) Financials, (2-4) Order Management/Accounts Receivable (OMAR) in the three divisions, and (5) the global rollout. Within the sub-groups, additional waves were created to ease into the system. For both the Financials and OMAR, Tektronix decided to implement the new system in the United States first. Though the ultimate goal was for location to be irrelevant in the system and processes required for an order to be completed, it was important that the company see the added-value of the implementation as it proceeded.
Toyota has implemented many different systems such as performance monitoring software, the Just in time (JIT) inventory system, electronic quality control system, communication system and information system thought out their value chain which enable to make correct decision during the manufacturing process. They have identified that having large inventories of spares cost them extensive capital and they have implemented the Just in time (JIT) inventory system which advices the suppliers the exact spares that the product line required and provides a time frame. Toyota adopted continuous learning and embraces change allowing their staff to research and innovation (Toyota