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 stake identical to Monopoly. Initially, the companys 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 oer the last fit 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 attached five years. X-Opolys Process X-Opolys clients necessitate either a new game board that has not been produced or repeat orders for a game that was previously produced.Once th e request for a new game is received from a client, a meeting is arranged with a graphic designer from X-Opolys art department and the actual game board is designed. The okay 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 station 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 poppycock resembling poster board.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 world 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 energy Measurin g X-Opolys 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 Whats essential? Whether X-Opoly is simply seek 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 war-ridden 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 companys production l ine maximum capacity/day is would increase by reducing the waste and redundancy in design and development which would increase the companys efficiency. To further improve X-Opolys efficiency, I would recommend growth 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, decrease inventory and increase X-Opolys productivity. The increase productivity would assist the company in meeting and possibly exceeding future demands. Finally, I believe X-Opoly would upbeat 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 Manu facturing Systems. Retrieved October 2011