Read the below case of ABCD Company and answer the questions:
A. What was the problem at ABCD Company?
B. How the ABCD Company reengineered the processes?
C. What were the outcomes at ABCD Company?
Case of ABCD Company:
Re-engineering was executed in the production process of ABCD Company in response to a competitive challenge. In 1987, ABCD Company has no competitive offering against XYZ Company’s newly announced 35 mm single use camera which the customer purchases loaded with film, uses once, and then returns to the manufacturer, who processes the film and breaks down the camera into parts for reuse. ABCD Company’s traditional product design process would have taken seventy weeks to produce a rival to XYZ’s camera. Such a time delay would have handed Fuji an enormous head starts and advantage in a new market. To cut its time –to- market, ABCD Company decided to reengineer its product development process. ABCD Company’s old product development process was partly sequential and partly parallel, but entirely slow. At ABCD Company, the manufacturing engineers could begin their work only after twenty-eight weeks the product designers had started. ABCD Company reengineered its product development process through the innovative use of a technology called computer aided design/computer aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM). With this technology, managers take the advantage of being able to design at computer workstations instead of drafting tables which have made them more productive in the end. The technology that has enabled ABCD Company to reengineer its process is an integrated product design database. Each day, each engineers’ work is collected by the database and combined into a coherent whole. After that, design groups and individuals inspect the database to see whether someone else’s work from previous day has created a problem for them and for the overall design. If so, the problem is resolved immediately, instead of after weeks or months of wasted work. Moreover, this technology allows manufacturing engineers to switch from their tooling design into the development process in no time lost, after some shape has given the first prototype by product designers. Furthermore, because the reengineered process allows tooling designers to participate before the product design is finished, their expertise can be utilized to create a design that is more easily and inexpensively manufactured.