Question

Please discuss the function of a focussed factory and provide an example on their activity with respect to production and focus

Answer 1

Ans. The focused factories are the factories in which Production facility organized around a specific, narrowly-limited set of resources, to provide a narrow range of operations or services in manufacture of a few products at low-cost and high-throughput. Most mass production facilities are designed as focused factories. The creators of a focused factory wanted it to make a very narrow range of products at minimal costs. They designed the production facility so that it would have a high rate of throughput.

A typical focused factory has a significant fixed asset base. It also produces at extremely high volume, i.e., it mass-produces things.

If its owner doesn’t have it producing a lot, it will be running at a loss. This is because this type of factory has relatively large fixed costs. Therefore, it needs a relatively high production rate just to break even.

Five key characteristics of the focused factory are:

1. Process technologies: Typically, unproven and uncertain technologies are limited to one per factory. Proven, mature technologies are limited to what their managers can easily handle, typically two or three (e.g., a foundry, metal working, and metal finishing).

2. Market demands: These consist of a set of demands including quality, price, lead times, and reliability specifications. A given plant can usually only do a superb job on one or two demands at any given period of time.

3. Product volumes: Generally, these are of comparable levels, such that tooling, order quantities, materials handling techniques, and job contents can be approached with a consistent philosophy. But what about the inevitable short runs, customer specials, and one-of-a-kind orders that every factory must handle? The answer is usually to segregate them. This is discussed later.

4. Quality levels: These employ a common attitude and set of approaches so as to neither overspecify nor overcontrol quality and specifications. One frame of mind and set of mental assumptions suffice for equipment, tooling, inspection, training, supervision, job content, materials handling.

5. Manufacturing tools: These are limited to only one (or two at the most) at any given time. The task at which the plant must excel in order to be competitive focuses on one set of internally consistent, doable, noncompromised criteria for success.

Rent, for example, is a fixed cost.The focused factory was all the rage in the seventies and eighties.