Problem Solution: Kuiper Leda

Running head: PROBLEM SOLUTION: KUIPER LEDA

Problem Solution: Kuiper Leda

James Stone

Problem Solution: Kuiper Leda

Inventory management involves planning and controlling inventory from the raw materials stage, through to the customers end. Businesses rely on suppliers for inputs that are required to manufacture products.

Kuiper Leda Inc. is located in the republic of Novamia, and is an electronics component manufacturer. Their specialty is electronic control units and sensors, which are highly used in the automotive industry, and by original equipment manufacturers. The company has successfully operated for ten years and has recently entered into manufacturing Radio Frequency Identification Tags.

Kuiper Leda, to date, has worked primarily with small customers, and has a limited daily capacity of parts they can produce. The company believes the increasing demand of quality parts has identified a bottleneck within their manufacturing operation, which dictates the constant upgrading of information systems, processes, and the supply chain management.

Situation Analysis

Issue and Opportunity Identification

Kuiper Leda has a limited daily capacity of parts that can be manufactured. In addition, the company has recently entered into the Radio Frequency Identification manufacturing product line and does not have a strong customer base, or a huge manufacturing capacity. Kuiper Leda is also interested in exploring technology-based options designed to optimize key elements of the company supply chain. Kuiper Leda has accepted an order from a major OEM, which exceeds the capacity of the production facility, and must identify ways to increase throughput, and minimize cost with regard to the Capacity Management, and Inventory management.

Kuiper Leda has an opportunity to partner with outsourcing vendors with the potential to increase the inventory capacity, which will be necessary to accept large orders in the ECU, and RFID industry, from major OEM and automobile manufacturers. Historically (and still typically in most firms) manufacturers have tried to balance capacity across a sequence of processes in an attempt to match capacity with market demand. The rule here is that capacities within the process sequence should not be balanced to the same levels. Rather, attempts should be made to balance the flow of product through the system. When flow is balanced, capacities are unbalanced (Chaseв?’Jacobsв?’Aquilano, 2005, p.723, 724).

Kuiper Leda also has the opportunity to increase their customer base as well as increasing the overall bottom line by entering into the RFID manufacturing processes. The new service development process can be viewed as a cycle of activities. The development and analysis stages represent the planning phase where the strategic fit and market viability are determined (Chaseв?’Jacobsв?’Aquilano, 2005, p.282).

Kuiper Leda has identified the need and the opportunity to incorporate optimization technology into their current program to identify areas of improvement within the manufacturing environment and the supply chain. Total quality management can be defined as managing the entire organization so that it excels on all dimensions of products and services that are important to the customer. Careful design of the product or service, and ensuring that the organization’s systems can consistently produce the design are two key factors (Chase�Jacobs�Aquilano, 2005, p.320).

Kuiper Leda has been afforded the opportunity to provide automobile parts as well as RFID tags to an American leader of OEM, which can strengthen their market place as a provider of quality OEM parts. External benchmarking is a recognized and accepted process that goes outside the organization to examine what industry competitors and excellent performers outside of industry are doing. Kuiper Leda will take advantage of this process making certain that a quality program really does have a customer focus and is sufficiently agile to be able to make improvements quickly without losing sight of the real-time needs of the business (Chaseв?’Jacobsв?’Aquilano, 2005, p.336).

Kuiper Leda’s efforts to increase the manufacturing capacity will overall increase the company’s capacity to accept large orders without the need for outsourcing, or limited and excessive inventory. Inventory is the stock of any item or resource used in an organization. An inventory system is the set of policies and controls that monitor levels of inventory and determine what levels should be maintained, when