Kettering University

The primary objective for this project is to reduce scrap associated with electronic failures in the manufacture of side by side refrigerators. Scrap can be attributed to three causes; supplier defects, design flaws, and operator error. This project will seek to address and at least partially assist in the reduction of all three of these failure modes. This will be accomplished through tear downs of scrapped product and communication of problems to both in-plant personnel and supplier representatives. Major design problems will be resolved and efforts to resolve suppliers? problems will be made. In the short term, scrapped refrigerators with supplier defects will be billed back to the offending company to reduce overall profit loss through scrap. Since the new 2006 model year there has been an increased amount of scrap related to supplier issues, design issues, and operator error. Although there has always been a significant amount of scrap related to the manufacture of side by side refrigerators in our Bloomington, IN plant, scrap has increased during the 2006 model year due to design changes as well as increases in the line rate involved the manufacturing process. Currently scrap is running $40,000-50,000 a week, which is excessive. This project aims to significantly reduce this number, thus reducing cost and increasing profits. When this project is complete, the Bloomington plant should see a significantly reduced number of scrapped refrigerators due to electronic failures. Weaknesses in the design will be communicated from me to design engineers, who, with my input, will develop a modified design of our current wiring harness to significantly reduce electronic failures resulting in scrapped refrigerators for the 2007 model year. Currently, this block change is slated for January 2007. Supplier scrap should also see significant reduction because of the design changes and communication of supplier related problems to the supplier representative. The success of my work will be determined during the start of the 2007 model year. If I am successful, the Bloomington plant should see significantly reduced scrap totals relating to electronic failures. We should see the weekly scrap total fall from about $50,000 a week to $30,000 or less. A zipping system (tear down) will be utilized in order to locate and solve problems with electronic failures. This will translate into design changes, which will translate into reduced scrap and a positive affect on profits.

As Valassis continues to grow, their dependence on technology also increases. This results in larger IT budgets, to purchase new servers, and to maintain the old servers, along with increase space to house those physical units. Valassis is growing as a company, and has an increased need for servers, and systems that relay on those servers. This has resulted in 3 data centers located in Michigan, along with other servers scattered throughout the U.S. offices. By utilizing the newest Server Virtualization technology, Valassis would be able to decrease the number of physical servers, thereby reducing the space that these systems take up, along with the cost of maintaining a greater number of physical units. The number of physical servers at Valassis? corporate facility alone has caused the need for additional environmental controls to be placed in an already crowded space.

Communication during a project is very important. The implementation of a project depends on everybody knowing their roles and responsibilities during the project. Documenting the project is also very important. This thesis shows the effective communication of a global project.

Discusses the possibility of opening production facilities and supplying the Chinese commercial vehicle OEM market with ArvinMeritor axles.

In the near future Medicare will be restructuring their payment plan based on the outcomes of patients. During the restructuring Medicare may possibly change the amount paid for certain diagnoses. In an action to be progressive TLC Health Care Services has recognized they can streamline their communication systems to reduce costs. The main idea behind the streamlining process is to change the responsibilities on individual network usage. The author has found that it is more appropriate to transfer the responsibility of individual usage to the individual and not the corporation; therefore, the average usage will decrease and allow for less costly contracts for the corporation. If the concepts behind this thesis are implemented, this corporation would reduce the cost of communications considerably.

In today?s office environment there is a lot of physical IT assets. Without a good system in place it is very hard for an IT manager to keep a good track of equipment. Data calls can take weeks in a large office if there is not an automated system. In a small office or organization an excel spreadsheet may suffice but once you get a few hundred pieces of equipment there needs to be a better way to organize the equipment. In addition, if you put these many small offices together under one IT department, it needs a way of tracking this equipment both for itself and for its customers. In this case a scenario a centralized web system was implemented using an SQL back end. This allowed for simplified querying and distributed management. You have the option of either one or two main administrators or each functional group managing their organizations IT assets. This thesis documents the needs for and the challenges of creating this asset management system.

It is important for every company to be able to identify their tooling assets. Assets at company owned locations as well as those at non-company owned locations must be accounted for. In addition to knowing what is in invetory, you also need to know where it is located. Where is a critical factor in determining property taxes. To accomplish this task successfuly there must be procedures and tools to handle this information.

Our Technology Group faces several hurdles when preparing to respond to government requests for proposal. The Technology Group must respond with technical information based on past performance on previous contracts. With the introduction of an open source knowledge management portal, the company is able to respond to proposals more quickly and effectively by viewing and editing past performance narratives and employee technical resumes.

Streamlining the processes and procedures of the CACH Label Quality Group will significantly increase the efficiency of the group, thus reducing the volume of packages that require re-processing in the hub. Roughly 90,000 packages must be re-handled throughout the hub daily. Eliminating wastes, focusing on customer needs, and improving communication will allow Label Quality to increase the number of packages audited and issues resolved.

The compilation of resumes for the Kettering Business Department decreases productivity. The resumes are kept in different formats. A Resume Database increases the functionality and allows the Department Head to make better decisions. Implementation of a RDBMS speeds up the compilation and printing of faculty resumes. Choose a software program the department can use and install the Resume Database System. The installation of a Resume Database allows resumes to be created and printed in minutes.

The goal of this thesis was to create a tool for analyzing customers financially. The Tier II KAM now has such a tool providing account managers with a thorough understanding of the potential customer's financial condition prior to business negotiations. The thesis also provides an in depth analysis of each of SV's Tier I Customers allowing for an even better understanding of the customer's financial situation.

This thesis evaluated a tool for door effort used by another manufacturing plant within general motors. After evaluation of the tool the thesis determined where the tool was repeatable and if it was able to be modified to work on the products being produced at Fairfax Assembly.

This thesis is the experience in the project management world of IT system. The system MATSPC/APOPS is a legacy mainframe that is due for a support expense increase in the 2006 General Motors IT MSA. The need for a new upgraded system that takes advantage of new web based technology is in order to cut costs. The decision was made to leverage and already existing system?s hardware, so the MATSPC/APOPS application must work in conjunction with already existing server software. This thesis will go over the steps that produce IT systems under General Motor's SDP-21 process. Observations of problems and issues were made during the project life that will be examined. Recommendations will then be made using PMI standards to solve project problems.

This thesis represents the culmination of all work the student performed relating to implementing Northwest Analytical's Quality program into the Labworks laboratory information management system at the State laboratory's Drinking Water laboratory. Quality Analyst program is now being used to improve quality control processes and forecast possible trends in quality control process was previously done manually using Microsoft Excel at great cost and time. The process can now be done automatically virtually instantly at great savings to the laboratory and the State of Michigan as a whole.

UPS gathers a large amount of data on packages, but much of it is just kept for records. This thesis takes steps to solve that problem by creating an automated e-mail system to track problems. The author conducted research on the issue, and created a system using open source software to solve the issue.