Samuel Dorfman

Evergreen Products Case Study

The primary complaint of Evergreen’s critical customers is wait time, which can be lessened by reducing variance of arrival times, reducing utilization of the shop floor which currently runs at a high 80 percent, or reducing the process times by improving efficiency of the current process. The bottleneck of Evergreen’s process occurs during the order entry stage. This processes can be made faster simply by sending the orders directly to the sales manager the moment it is collected, rather than having him pick up all sales orders once a day. Furthermore, since 40% of orders contain some form of error, an approach should be taken to reduce the number of errors, maybe through hiring more clerks so each one has more time to focus on each individual order. Because errors will undoubtedly be made, those that encounter errors should be given priority and be corrected right away. Once cleared by the Sales Managers, the orders should immediately be sent to accounting to commence the billing process, rather than picking up all the orders once a day. This would eliminate any time wasted where the accounting department is either waiting for orders, or orders have come in after they have already received the daily pile. The shop floor planner should not be held accountable for the current wait times. Only having a 15% error rate is acceptable, and taking one day to clear the shop floor is less than the maximum of two days it can take at both the arrival and processing stages of the process. Evergreen should hire more warehouse workers to reduce their utilization and overtime hours (which can lead to inefficient tired workers). Since Evergreen knows it will be busy during various holidays throughout the year, it should try to get customers to order prior to these days to avoid spikes in order