How Should Albatross Anchor Overcome Its Business Challenges Case Study

How Should Albatross Anchor Overcome Its Business Challenges - Case Study Example The current time management process at Albatross Anchor is poor and outdated. There are a lot of inefficiencies in manufacturing. The changeover time required from one anchor type to another is as large as 36 hours. This implies that the company may be spending more time in set-up rather than manufacturing. No doubt the lead time of the products manufactured by the company for bulk orders is 3-4 weeks. These inefficiencies in time management have a huge impact on its profit margins and customer satisfaction.The most obvious and the best way of time management is to reduce set-up time. It is recommended that Albatross Anchor uses SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dyes) methodology. The idea behind this methodology is to reduce set-up time to less than a minute (which was later modified to a single digit). It may not be possible to literally reduce the set-up time to a single digit. The aim should reduce the set-up time realistically to as low as possible.SMED can be applied by Albatross Anchor by identifying the activities which can be performed externally i.e. not within the machine set up. These activities need to be performed before the changeover is required. This means deploying certain resources for performing these external activities in parallel while the other resources are working on the machine for current operation. All the wastes should be eliminated and each operation should be optimized. If Albatross can afford to make the capital investment, it needs to go for equipment which has the same basic parts and requires only a change of few parts (dyes) while changing over from one anchor to another. By following such steps, Albatross Anchor should be able to reduce its set up time from 36 hours to less than an hour.One of the biggest challenges in front of Albatross Anchor is the use of obsolete technology. Moreover, technology is not being used for several operations. This leads to safety issues, poor quality, long lead times, long set-up times, efficie ncy losses and customer dissatisfaction.The biggest need at the moment is to adopt the latest manufacturing technology.