Over three years, Mr. Rupp managed numerous projects worth ~$52M in capital equipment and IT systems investments during the renovation of two printed circuit board fabrication sites, a high-volume facility, and an advanced technologies facility. Mr. Rupp was initially hired as the project manager to support the government-funded construction and future production within the advanced manufacturing facility. In that role, Mr. Rupp analyzed the facility layout designs, equipment capacities, manufacturing processes, and workflow to determine the plant’s ability to meet the contract’s production requirements.
As a result of his preliminary analysis, Mr. Rupp predicted and communicated potential production performance issues before the facility went online. The issues were related to an engineering focus on the development of individual manufacturing processes and equipment without taking a systemic view to analyze the performance of the plant as a whole. In other words, the engineers had planned performance capacities around the manufacturing equipment and processes, and not analyzed the interrelationships and impacts as parts of a larger and integrated manufacturing system.
Mr. Rupp used queuing theory, just in time (JIT), and theory of constraints concepts and simulation modeling tools to come up with a strategy to address the production problems. To fix the problems, the company had to move some of its manufacturing capacity to the high-volume facility to make additional room to expand and better align the equipment within the advanced manufacturing plant. Mr. Rupp helped plan and supported the transfer of local manufacturing capacity to the high-volume plant. He also helped plan the new layouts and directed reconstruction within the advanced manufacturing facility to optimize the flow of work. Mr. Rupp’s activities enabled the advanced manufacturing facility to get back on schedule and deliver the highly advanced printed circuit boards significantly below budgeted costs. Additionally, he sought and obtained funding for technology developments to enhance the printed circuit boards’ substrates so that they could match the clock speeds of the then emergent very-high-speed integrated circuits (VHSIC) technology.