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Littlefield Technologies Simulation 1 Report

Littlefield Technologies Simulation 1 Report

As a financial analyst, I viewed the Littlefield simulation as an opportunity to apply what I’ve learned in class with what I do best: crunch data. But first, I wanted to understand the process. After reading and copying all of the important points about the process, I began to gather data.
I began by creating a spreadsheet listing all the days, 1-268. Since purchasing decisions were disabled for this simulation, I knew I would not need any of the inventory data. Those decisions were beyond my control. Ultimately, I captured the data for the following fields: Jobs Arriving, Station 1 Queue, Station 1 Utilization, Station 2 Queue, Station 2 Utilization, Station 3 Queue, Station 3 Utilization, Completed Jobs, Lead Time, and Revenues. I used Jobs Arriving and Completed Jobs to calculate Net Jobs In System, to help me understand if I were to be in danger of exceeding the ‘100 jobs in system’ limitation. I also used ‘completed jobs’ and ‘Revenues’ to calculate total lost revenue due to late jobs. Finally, I captured the interest revenue, which allowed me to calculate that we were earning approximately 10% annual interest on our cash.
At this point, I decided my strategy would be to try to purchase machines ‘just in time’ to maximize interest income while still minimizing lost revenues (due to late penalties).
After capturing the first 50 days of data, it became apparent to me that Station 1 was the bottleneck in this system. As of the start of the simulation, we had six days on station 1 at 100% utilized, resulting in four days with late jobs resulting in loss of revenues. The total estimated loss of revenues over those four days was $332. I calculated that the cost of a new machine #1 ($90,000) represented an interest loss of approximately $25 per day. Given that incoming jobs seemed to be trending higher, so I felt I would be prudent to purchase a new machine for Station 1 on day 50, as any...