Litton Industries Plant

PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT PROPOSAL FOR A LITTON INDUSTRIES PLANT

This research presents a proposal for a process intervention designed to increase productivity at a Litton Industries manufacturing plant. The Litton Advanced Circuitry Division manufactures preprinted circuit boards. A significant proportion of the plant's production involves the design and manufacture of circuit boards to fulfill the unique requirements of different customers. Within such an environment, productivity improvement is heavily dependent on the efficient and seamless interaction between user and producer (Whiting, 1993, pp. 6168). The proposed intervention is structured to improve both the quality and the speed of the required interactions between user and producer between the time of order inquiry and design approval.

At present, the mean time between customer order inquiry and design approval is seven days. This time span often proves to be inconvenient for the customer, and the present time span also affects adversely the productivity of the Litton plant. The losses to the Litton plant range from lost contracts because of slow reaction time to customer requests to inflated human resource costs because of the inefficient management of available resources.

The Zytec Corp., a manufacturer of power supplies for electronics equipment, solved a similar problem to that being faced by the Litton plant through the implementation of a process

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