Production_Plan_Ops_571

Bottlenecks in Process Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano (2006) stated that bottleneck hinders the system and limits throughput. When throughout is limited a narrow stream of production is in action and poses a problem to the company because production is not at a maximum level. The author has collected data to minimize the time spent in finding an externship site for students. The data collected does show a bottleneck, and therefore Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC) will be used to identify and manage constraints (Dettmer, 1995.) The situation is as follows: Maria the externship administrator has four weeks to find 18 to 22 students externship sites on a monthly basis. What makes this process arduous is the fact that the sites must be within a driving range for the student, and the sites must be the type of practice the student chose to do his or her externship. Another bottleneck to successfully find an externship site in a timely manner are sites who do not want to sign contracts, which hinders the school from placing a student at that particular facility because it is against Kaplan law; or sites not having the need for an extern student. In the past two weeks the author has implemented a TOC system to schedule times to research sites for each student, call employers, interview students, and finalize the site between student and site. In the past Maria had a file cabinet full of contracts containing sites where she could send students. The bottleneck in this situation was that she did not have time to input all those sites with contracts into an excel spreadsheet or a database to make her process easier by using the spreadsheet rather than looking through a file cabinet full of files. In the past two weeks, the author sat with Maria to organize her schedule and block times throughout the day to focus only in the creation of the spreadsheet. To this date, Maria has followed her rigorous schedule and has managed to enter 158 sites into the spreadsheet, thus enabling her to work off what she has in the spreadsheet to quickly allocate sites within a close driving range for the student. The spreadsheet consists of the name of facility or doctors’ office, address, type of business, and phone number. According to Goldratt, in Operations Management for Competitive Advantage (2006), his general theory of constraints finds the problem hindering the objective to reach goal and finds new ways to work around it. According to TOC, (Cook, 1994) the author did not have to look further into the bottleneck because the constraining issue was found and buffered. In the author’s situation, she has found the bottleneck and found the way to work around it. She has been quite successful in placing students at externship sites in an efficient and timely manner because of the process implemented in the past two weeks. TOC will help both Maria and the Author stay in continuous improvement (Dettmer, 1995.) References Chase, R. B., Jacobs, R., & Aquilano, N. (2006). Operations Management for Competitive Advantage (11th Ed.) McGraw Hill/Irvin. Cook, D. P. (1994). A simulation Comparison of Traditional, JIT, and TOC Manufacturing systems in a Flow Shop with Bottlenecks. Production and Inventory Management Journal, 35(1), 3. doi:19948660 Dettmer, W. (April, 1995). Quality and theory of Constraints. Quality Progress, 28(4), 1. doi:214741320