Texas Instruments
...ecasted sales and peak monthly requirements have increased substantially since the line was designed. Can the market demand be met by the capacity of the Lubbock assembly line? 3. Inventory: Because of constantly changing technology and supply shortages, TI does not have sufficient incoming and work-in-progress buffers sitting in its warehouses but at the same time they need to have enough inventories on hand to meet peak monthly demand. Three Recommendations: 1. TI needs to redesign and rebalance the assembly line and to include non-standard operations. They can reduce cycle time and increase throughput by changing the sequence of activities and parallel processing. Some steps might be better produced in batch and then reintroduced to the line, to bring the cycle time down. TI needs to bring their bottleneck operations under control and keep the re-handling of material to a minimum. 2. Texas Instruments needs to determine which approach is most desirable in order to increase capacity. Is it desirable to increase capacity by adding more lines and if so what is the best approach, or can it be done with process redesign to increase the number of units done per shift without expansion? Adequate machine capacity is needed to meet peak monthly demands. TI nee...