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September: |
| Featured Project Review New Product Introduction & Manufacturing Optimization Click
here to read the full project review.
Situation: Market demands, industry volatility, and Teradyne stockholder expectations have increased in many areas including profitability, quality, and service levels. Meeting and exceeding these expectations requires aggressive, and potentially conflicting operational goals to be met concurrently (ex. reducing cycle times, increasing yield, minimizing costs and optimizing inventory simultaneously). Objectives: The Operations NPI Team, decided to test ProModel’s simulation technology to see if it could provide the level of answers that the current tool-set and methods could not. The initial objective for this project was a “proof of concept” for simulation technology. If the proof of concept worked, then simulation would be incorporated into the Operations NPI tool-set for decision support. Solution: A “proof of concept” simulation solution was created with which the introduction of new products could be evaluated in a risk-free environment. The major questions Operations NPI wanted to answer with this initial model were as follows: 1) What is the cost impact of quality (yield of the manufacturing process)
to our internal and external manufacturing partners? Quantify this in
terms of technician debug resources, repair technicians, scrap and inventory
buffer requirements. Decision makers and model users can modify any input parameter of the model and evaluate the impact on the critical outputs. For example, the users can vary the available capacity, the hourly labor rates, the product yield, etc to evaluate the impact on the product cost, the cycle time, and process efficiency, among other factors. This enables concrete data-driven decision-making and supports the company’s TQM methodologies. The diagram below depicts the flow of the solution and how it helps to answer the relevant strategic business questions.
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