Donner Company Case

Operations Management
Donner produced specialised circuit board known as “Solder mask over bare copper “(SMOBC)
as per the specification of a variety of customers. Donner receives huge variety in orders ranging
from a single board to more than one thousand board. Donner had twenty-two production workers
who were multi skilled and could perform different tasks in different areas as and when needed.
David Flaherty, the shop supervisor was responsible for all the manufacturing processes and
shuffling the workers across various workstations.
Donner promised its customers 3 weeks delivery if the order size was less than 1000 and 5 weeks,
if the order size was more than 1000 boards. Currently Donor is suffering from many problems
like: quality, timely deliveries, labour utilisation, frequent bottlenecks etc.
Depending on the type of circuit board to be manufactured, the company faced bottlenecks at
different points in the process flow. This was without any pattern and hence no solution till now
has been found of dealing with regular bottlenecks.
A brief analysis of the problems faced by Donner is as follow:
Rush orders – The rush order with promised delivery time of 4 days were given priority and
replaced existing orders which were in process. The average frequency of rush orders was around
three per week. This lead to frequent bottlenecks at different stages.
Customer modifications – Many a times customer’s engineers called to request modifications
after a board design and manufacturing process had started. This stalled the production of the board
due to customer’s pending confirmation and due to modification, if any, needed to be worked upon
into the design and approved. Approximately one fourth of the delays were attributes to these calls.
Constant shuffling of resources-- As the flow of orders was not known beforehand, Flaherty used
to shuffle the manpower across different workstations which resulted in inefficient utilization of
manpower.
Task interruption – Operators moved in between their task almost 6-12 times per day to seek
advice, ask for work from upstream sources and for delivering completed work. This primarily
showcases the lack of set process flow and communication between different operations and their
workers.
Return rework-- The quality standards ranged from client to client and only an informal check
was done at Donner’s end. This resulted in almost 9 out of 10 deliveries lacking in quality in terms
of missed parts or incomplete operation.
Pre-shipment rework – Out of the 7% reject rate at pre-shipment 6% were due to incomplete
operations. This highlights the need for better supervision and inspection during the manufacturing
process.