RESQ for FLASHMEM, Inc.: An IS Teaching Case

Tuesday Morning Angelo Rodriguez and Jamie Barton are visibly shaken, and it isn't even 7am. They and their sprawling papers cover nearly half of the round meeting table. Rodriguez is the day shift Manufacturing Lead, and Barton is the night shift Lead at FLASHMEM's South West factory. This morning, they are brainstorming about the possible consequences of this latest problem on the manufacturing floor. They knew they'd be facing a veritable firing squad at today's 8am operations meeting. Equipment is known to fail, but Rodriguez or Barton should have responded to the warning signs days ago. The EB70 had been operating on borrowed time for too long, since its quarterly preventive maintenance was due more than two weeks ago. As they transitioned from Barton's night shift this morning, he and Rodriguez authorized the shut down of the EB70 for a major maintenance overhaul that will cripple production for at least four days. Further, the out-of-spec production runs leading up to this failure will cost FLASHMEM millions. In this commodity industry, production losses quickly lead to lost customers. Clearly Barton and Rodriguez shared responsibility for this preventable loss, and they were preoccupied with this immediate disaster as they waited for the IS folks to show up for their 7:15 meeting. Ten days ago, Rodriguez had scheduled this meeting using the company-wide calendar tool. The stated purpose of the meeting is to iron out some problems deploying RESQ in the factory. He had wanted to meet sooner than today, but this was the earliest that all four of them would be available for more than 30 minutes. If Eli Bethel from IS hadn't agreed to come in an hour early, even this meeting wouldn't have been possible. Their boss (who is also the factory Manager), Mitchell Haddon, had assigned to Rodriguez the rollout of the new production tracking system aptly called RESQ (an acronym meaning Resource for Estimates and Scheduled Quantities), and they needed to focus on that priority for the next 45 minutes. Given their current crisis, however, he and Barton both wished they had the next hour to plan for the 8am meeting. Resource for Estimates & Scheduled Quantities (RESQ) RESQ is a hot new technology at FLASHMEM. It organizes estimated and actual production data for the hundreds of production steps and for the dozens of products while giving users a PC spreadsheet front end. With the click of a mouse, RESQ produces on-screen reports and charts of production by week, shift or day going back for months. With another click, RESQ displays the production goals, along with progress toward those goals. The data is refreshed from the database every 15 minutes, thereby providing nearly real-time access to production information. RESQ can help at all levels in production management. Production workers can measure their own progress toward daily goals, can see when work in process (WIP) "bubbles" are expected at their machine, and when they'll have time windows for breaks and scheduled mini-maintenance. Production supervisors can schedule work through their areas by viewing the upstream and downstream WIP at known bottlenecks along with the production goals for their shifts. Upper management can use RESQ to identify and track trends. It is one tool in a strategy to increase overall productivity, a strategy that includes moving decision-making closer to production floor and establishing consistency in decision-making methods. RESQ embeds business and production rules into its algorithms. The rules originate with management policies and business rules and govern prioritization of WIP, utilization of equipment, and scheduling of maintenance. Many of the present problems at the South West factory stem from having considered each of these decisions independently from one other, and RESQ enables an integrated approach. Understanding the interactions and ultimately finding the right balance among conflicting constraints is a daunting task. …