Scope and research statment

Team Purpose

Team 203 was formed within the MIME Capstone design sequence for the purpose of applying the knowledge, experience, and skills gained throughout the undergraduate program to a real-word engineering project. The purpose we serve is to enable our customer to broaden their product variety by increasing the efficiency meeting order due dates.

Team Goals

The ultimate goal of the project is to meet our customer's’ expectations by increasing the efficiency in the process of manufacturing paintbrush handles, so as to decrease the amount of annual days required to complete orders. In effect, this will allow for the extra time to be solely devoted towards widening product variety and for all the company’s resources to be allocated to this endeavor.

In regard to quality, our goal is to ensure that once customer expectations are met that our protocols can easily be employed in a continuous fashion so as to sustain these improvements following the completion of our project.

As a team, we are willing to put in the necessary time required to satisfy the customer and beyond. Our aim is to treat this project no different than a paid internship or any job for that matter. We understand the benefits and skills acquired from this opportunity far outweigh the efforts. In light of these considerations, our team is collectively aiming for an A in this course and IE 498 as well.

Team Member Roles/Responsibilities

Team Member	Role	Responsibilities/Strengths
Douglas	- Project Manager - Meeting coordinator - Point of contact with project sponsor - Writing editor - Coordinate scheduling & deadlines - Coordinate turn-in of team assignments - Coordinate spring term Engineering Expo	- Key communicator - Oversee the completion and correctness of team assignments - Researching and implementing lean principles - Managing data collection - Technical writing
Abdullah	- Data entry and analysis - CAD layouts and designs - Documentation of data analysis and results	- CAD design of layouts and mechanical parts - Proficient in Excel - Researching and implementing lean principles - Proficient in Visio
Justin	- Point of contact with team advisor - Data entry and analysis - Documentation of data analysis and results	- Practical fabrication knowledge - Design and implementation of mechanical parts - Practical knowledge of shop floor machinery - Proficient in Excel

Customer Requirements

Requirement ID	Customer Requirement	Weightings (Out of 100)
1	Incorporating the shop floor workers in the procedures of increasing efficiency.	15
2	Reduce paintbrush handle load on the bottlenecks machines.	12
3	Shift production of 250 handle series to other production cells and increase throughput.	15
4	Design a production schedule to determine how much needs to be produced each day to meet order deadlines.	17
5	Find a way to use other cells when unavoidable machines downtimes occur.	12
6	Reduce backlog of orders.	17
7	Optimize sequencing procedures for each paintbrush handle style to eliminate unnecessary steps and machines in the production process.	12

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

KPI # 1

Justification:

• A paintbrush handle series called the 250 series comprise 51.6% of all paint brush handle orders.

• The 250 handle series can only be processed in the Yellow and Green cells (refer to Factory Layout & Flow Diagram).

• The Yellow cell has 4 bottleneck (Push-Pull) machines.

• The Green cell has 2 bottleneck (Push-Pull) machines.

• Based on the bottlenecks, the optimal utilization is:

o 66% for the Yellow cell.

o 33% for the Green cell.

Current State Performance:

• The Yellow cell produces 73% of 250 handle series orders.

• The Green cell produces 27% of 250 handle series orders.

Goal:

• Shift 6% of production to the Green cell for 250 series handle orders.

KPI # 2

Justification:

• There are 5 cells that could partially be utilized in the production of 250 series handles (refer to Factory Layout & Flow Diagram).

Current State Performance:

• The Yellow and Green cell produce every 250 handle series order (51.5% of production load).

Goal:

• Make use of another cell by setting up 1 more bottleneck machine to process 250 handle series orders.