Case Study

The subject of this activity is a product known as the Magic Box. The part number is 12-100.

You work for a company that manufactures, sells, and services capital equipment. The products are electro/mechanical devices that are large enough to require on-site service and repair.

Shortly after releasing the new model of the product, disaster struck. Field units began to fail. The service calls came pouring in. In spite of the best efforts of your Service Engineers, the failures, electrical in nature, kept occurring. The failures only occur when the machines are running above 80% of their maximum rate.

Following an exhaustive and heroic effort of the combined engineering groups, a solution was found. The bad news is that the mother board, part number 12-102, must be replaced with a newly designed PCB assembly, part number 12-112.

Here are the facts as we know them today:

1 The fabricator for the new PCB can begin delivering part number 12-112 at a rate of 100 per week from their prototype line until the production line tooling is available. The first delivery of 100 mother boards will arrive one week from this coming Monday and will continue at 100 per week for three additional deliveries. After that, the production tooling will meet all of our production needs.

2 There are currently 224 Magic Boxes in the field. The Marketing Vice President has directed that units in the field be upgraded prior to building new systems or retro-fitting Finished Goods Inventory (FGI). The Field Engineers will require a new Service Procedure containing the new systems test routine.

3 The reworking of FGI requires a unique set of instructions contained in a newly written, but yet to be released document. Its release is critical to the availability of the 330 Magic Boxes that are currently held by Quality Control with a quarantine status.

4 All Work in Process (WIP) and future orders will be built using the revised assembly procedure containing the additional systems test routine as well as the changes associated with the new mother board.

Your task is to write the change order(s) that will govern the activities and document release or revisions that remedy the current crisis. Be sure that the information you include in your documentation is sufficient to provide Purchasing, Production, Planning, Quality Control, and Field Service all of the instruction that is required to accomplish their tasks with only one possible interpretation.