Stickley Furniture Case Study
Stickley Furniture
Stickley Furniture
Ashford University
Business 644 Operations Management
Professor Ronald Beach
December 12, 2012
An analysis of Stickley Furniture’s production, aggregate planning production control, inventory and quality reveals that the company has made changes that have proven successful strategies for the long term success of the company since it was sold in 1974. The analysis presented here will show areas of strength and areas of improvement. L. & J.G. Stickley Furniture has a production facility that is rectangular in design with 30 foot ceilings and this building is staged to facilitate several different production processes from continuous production their primary production process, job shop for custom furniture, batch processing and repetitive to produce a large number of furniture products made from Mahogany, Cherry and White Oak in the Mission Oak Style. Stickley primarily uses the continuous production process along each point in the production of Mission Oak Furniture. First stacks of raw lumber are received from the lumber mills and parced out by material handlers. The bulk wood is cut into smaller sizes in batch processing. Then the raw lumber is inspected to check for knots and other defects. The inspectors of the raw lumber look for imperfections such as knots and other defects, on the cut wood and mark the locations to prepare it for cutting by the Optimizer Saw. After the lumber inspection process is completed the raw wood is fed into the Optimizer saw that has the unique feature of an onboard computer that calculates the optimal cut pattern for each piece of wood to fulfill the needs for the jobs that are in the queue. Using the optimizer saw reduces waste by optimally cutting the wood away from the defects like knots and allowing for the scrap to be reused. The lumber scrap pieces that are cut out by the optimizer saw are glue together to form workable wood. Those wood pieces, that have
Stickley Furniture
Ashford University
Business 644 Operations Management
Professor Ronald Beach
December 12, 2012
An analysis of Stickley Furniture’s production, aggregate planning production control, inventory and quality reveals that the company has made changes that have proven successful strategies for the long term success of the company since it was sold in 1974. The analysis presented here will show areas of strength and areas of improvement. L. & J.G. Stickley Furniture has a production facility that is rectangular in design with 30 foot ceilings and this building is staged to facilitate several different production processes from continuous production their primary production process, job shop for custom furniture, batch processing and repetitive to produce a large number of furniture products made from Mahogany, Cherry and White Oak in the Mission Oak Style. Stickley primarily uses the continuous production process along each point in the production of Mission Oak Furniture. First stacks of raw lumber are received from the lumber mills and parced out by material handlers. The bulk wood is cut into smaller sizes in batch processing. Then the raw lumber is inspected to check for knots and other defects. The inspectors of the raw lumber look for imperfections such as knots and other defects, on the cut wood and mark the locations to prepare it for cutting by the Optimizer Saw. After the lumber inspection process is completed the raw wood is fed into the Optimizer saw that has the unique feature of an onboard computer that calculates the optimal cut pattern for each piece of wood to fulfill the needs for the jobs that are in the queue. Using the optimizer saw reduces waste by optimally cutting the wood away from the defects like knots and allowing for the scrap to be reused. The lumber scrap pieces that are cut out by the optimizer saw are glue together to form workable wood. Those wood pieces, that have
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