Board Game and Total Cycle Time

X-Opoly Inc. X-Opoly, Inc. , was founded by two first-year college students to produce a knockoff real estate board game similar to Monopoly. Initially, the company’s purpose was to produce a board game based on popular local landmarks in their small college town, as a way to help pay for their college expenses. However, due to big success and since they enjoyed running their own business, the founders decided to pursue the business full-time after graduation.

X-Opoly has growth over the last couple of years attributed to its designing and producing custom real estate trading games for universities, municipalities, chambers of commerce, and lately even some businesses. The company fills orders from a couple of hundred to several thousand and projects that its sales will grow 25 percent annually for the next five years. X-Opoly’s Process X-Opoly’s clients request either a new game board that has not been produced or repeat orders for a game that was previously produced.

Once the request for a new game is received from a client, a meeting is arranged with a graphic designer from X-Opoly’s art department and the actual game board is designed. The approved designs are transferred electronically to the printing department where they are loaded onto personal computers and printed on special decals. The printing department is also responsible for printing the property cards, game cards, and money. The money is then moved to the cutting department, where it is cut into individual bills. Similarly, property cards and game cards are produced with the exception of using material resembling poster board.

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In addition to cutting the money, game cards, and property cards, the cutting department also cuts the cardboard that serves as the substrate for the actual game board. After being cut, game boards, money, and cards are stored in totes in a work-in-process area and delivered to the appropriate station on the assembly line as needed. X-Opoly Operations Efficiency Measuring X-Opoly’s performance is the key to improving its service to customers. The company currently operates 19 stations with a total cycle time of 6 min 45 sec per job.

In my opinion, X-Opoly should consider combining assemblies within stations to reduce the number of stations. This process would allow some components to be partially assembled for the next station. This reduces the number of jobs involved in making multi-level products and keeps inventory to a minimum. Adopting a lean approach starts with a simple question: "What's essential? " Whether X-Opoly is simply trying to survive or conducting an assessment of their productivity, it is imperative to determine that every activity they engage in is essential in the value chain to providing a competitive product.

This involves analyzing each phase of the product lifecycle from innovation, to design and development, to testing and, eventually, manufacturing and removing the waste from those processes. For example, the company’s production line maximum capacity/day is would increase by reducing the waste and redundancy in design and development which would increase the company’s efficiency. To further improve X-Opoly’s efficiency, I would recommend developing a more formal manufacturing system (Flow Manufacturing). Flow manufacturing is a time-based process that pulls material through a production system without any interruption. (SAE. rg) This can be achieved by striking the proper balance between new technology and the proper amount of skilled labour. Flow manufacturing would reduce total cycle time, lessen inventory and increase X-Opoly’s productivity. The increase productivity would assist the company in meeting and possibly exceeding future demands. Finally, I believe X-Opoly would benefit from eliminating is non value added time to improve its efficiency. References Jacobs, F. , and Chase, R. , (2011). Operations and Supply Chain Management (13th ed. ). McGraw-Hill, New York, NY SAE. org (2011). Thinking of Lean Manufacturing Systems. Retrieved October 2011

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