Littlefield Technologies Essay

Managing Customer Responsiveness at Littlefield Technologies Background Littlefield Technologies (LT) has developed some other DSS product. The new product is manufactured using the same process as the product in the assignment Capacity instruction at Littlefield Technologies neither the process sequence nor the process measure distributions at each legal document prolong changed. On twenty-four hours 0, the factory began operations with three stuffers, unriv onlyed tester, and one tuner, and a raw materials register of 9600 kits.This left the factory with $1,000,000 in reserves. Customer prerequisite continues to be random, but the long-run average demand go away not change over the product 268-day life cadence. At the ratiocination s of this lifetime, demand will end abruptly and factory operations will be terminated. At this point, tout ensemble capacity and remaining inventory will be useless, and thus have no honor. Management would comparable to charge the higher prices that customers would pay for dramatically shorter give way times. However, historic touch times often extend into several days, so management has been averse to quote the shorter lead times.Operations Policies at Littlefield LT uses a Re govern evidence / Order Quantity raw material purchase policy. That is, raw kits argon purchased as soon as the following three criteria be all met (1) the inventory of raw kits is less than the companionship point, (2) thither ar no orders for raw kits currently outstanding, and (3) the factory has sufficient bills to purchase the reorder bill. No order is placed if any of these three criteria atomic number 18 not met. So, for example, a team could prevent orders from being placed at all by constituteting the order quantity so high that there is insufficient cash to place an order. Kits are purchased in multiples of 60 because orders aim in batches of 60.A reliable supplier delivers exactly the order quantity of batches, four d ays after the order is placed and paid for. Management considers physical cost of holding inventory negligible compared to the financial costs. other(a) details concerning the purchasing policy trick be found in the Littlefield Technologies Overview note. The current reorder point and reorder quantity can be changed by clicking on Edit Data on the Materials Buffer icon.Customers are willing to pay a premium for fast lead times, and you at present have three pricing needs to choose from price = $750 quoted lead time = 7 days maximum lead time = 14 days. (This is the contract that the factory starts with). price = $1000 quoted lead time = 1 day maximum lead time = 3 days. price = $1250 quoted lead time = 0.5 days maximum lead time = 1 day. As before, if an order lead time exceeds the quoted lead time, then the revenue for that s order decreases linearly, from the prices above for the quoted lead time to $0 for the maximum lead time.A contract is assigned to an order as soon as it arrives at the factory, and that contract cannot be changed subsequently for that order. Contracts for future orders can be selected by clicking on Edit Data on the Customer Order icon. You will also notice a few days where zero jobs are completed by the factory. On such days, the daily average lead time and daily average revenues are meaningless, so a value of zero will appear in the plots and downloaded data on those days. You are also allowed to buy and sell machines and change the scheduling rule at the tester.Assignment The factory has been running for 50 simulated days, and management has recalled the dynamical operations team (you) to manage the capacity, scheduling, purchasing, lot sizing, and contract quotations to maximize the cash generated by the factory over its lifetime. Management is not providing any operating(a) budget beyond the cash generated by the factory itself. You will have control of the factory from day 50 to day 218. At 1 hour per simulated day, this translates to 7 real days. At day 218, you draw back control of the factory, and the simulation will quickly run another 50 days of simulation.When you lose control of the factory, management expects you to leave the factory parameters set to maximize the factory cash position when the factory shuts down on day 268. After the simulation s ends on day 268, you can check the status of your factory, but the factory will no drawn-out be running. Your team should turn in one summary of what actions you took during the workweek you had access to the factory, why you took those actions, and in retrospect whether you think you did the right thing. immortalize analysis to justify your conclusions. Your team grade will be s partially based on your performance, but mainly based on your summary. The summary cannot exceed 3 pages in length, and no appendices are allowed.