Operations Management Case Study

Travelsafe Manufacturing Company (TMC)

OR

Abstract:
Travelsafe Manufacturing Company (TMC), is a leading manufacturer of leather products in North India. The main products of TMC include leather suitcases, leather briefcases, leather backpacks, leather suave backpacks, zippered leather briefcases. While all of its products were having a high demand and mobility in the market, except for the briefcase segment which showed a continuous downtrend. With increased marketing efforts targeted to its existing customers, TMC for the first time bagged a very big order for 60,000 leather briefcases. Since, its production facility was not suitable to handle such big orders, the management decided to change the existing facility layout to ‘Assembly line layout’ to meet the demand. The management modified the existing cycle time, number of work stations based on Assembly line balancing concept and ultimately the company achieved the efficiency of work stations to 78.6%.

Pedagogical Objectives:

This case helps in understanding:
• Assembly line balancing
• Computation of Cycle time
• Estimation of minimum number of Work stations
• Estimation of efficiency of the organisation.

Keywords : Operations Management, Assembly Line, Cycle Time, Assembly Line Balancing, Effeciency of Organization, Work Station, Task Time, Precedence Relationship, Product Layout Operations Planning, Work Centre, Utilization

Contents:

• Introduction
• Suggested Questions for Discussion