Process Selection and Design Essays - Sleep, Home Appliances

Week 1 ? Topic 1: Process Selection and Design Looking at the initial process in getting myself and my children together, I found two major bottle neck areas, and other hindering factors that affect the process design related to preparing myself and my children ready for school and work. I have three children. My oldest is a girl and is 18 years old. The middle child is also a girl, and is 15 years old. The third is a boy, and recently turned 13 years old in May. The morning usually started with my alarm going off at 0630. I will admit that there are times when I do hit the snooze button to get an additional nine minutes of sleep, but my snooze limit is one! Once awake, I go to each child?s room to wake them up. My daughters consistently wake up, however, it usually takes another time or two to wake up my son. I then move on to the bathroom to shower, and to brush my teeth and finish hair and makeup. While I am showering, one of the children showers and brushes his or her teeth in the second bathroom. My son is normally sleeping until I finish my bathroom time, and gets the final wake up call to get up and to start his own shower. My daughters usually take turns showering in the other bathroom. After all bathroom activity, clothes are ironed. Usually, the first person done with bathroom time gets to the iron first. As I noted on the original flowchart, for the sake of time (or so I thought), if ironing was not complete by the time I needed to the iron, I finished all of the ironing myself. From the 0630 wake up (sometimes 0639), waking the kids and finishing my bathroom time about 25 minutes have gone by. If the ironing is not complete by each child, I am rushing by then to make sure their clothes are done, so that we can all get dressed and I can provide some type of breakfast. The type of breakfast depends on the amount of time available. We all must leave the house by 0745 to get to our respective places on time. If I am done dressing by 0715, I am able to actually cook something like eggs, bacon and toast. If running any later than that, it becomes a pop tart or cold cereal morning. Using the utilization metric in looking at my morning process, it is clear that many improvements are needed. The first bottleneck occurred at the bathrooms. There are two in the house, however, because everyone in my household was showering in the morning, a bottleneck occurred, accounting for unnecessary space between individual cycle periods while one person is waiting for the other to finish. This without a doubt affects our morning productivity causing unneeded delays. The second bottle neck occurred in the area of ironing clothes. Although there are two irons and ironing boards, four of us usually have ironing to do, and again, we run into a bottleneck and unproductive waiting time. My initial plan involved ridding the process of the unnecessary delays caused by the bottlenecks. The proposed solution for bathroom time involved at least two people bathing at night versus in the morning, thus freeing up the bathrooms and eliminating unnecessary halts in production. For ironing, the suggested improvement was weekend preparation of everyone?s clothing for the week. This eliminates extra steps in the morning process as well as halts in production. Changing showering time shaved a good 20 minutes off of the time we all spend in the bathrooms. Over the weekend, the girls faithfully prepared their clothes, but I found that the ironing job my son did towards the end wasn?t so great. Therefore I added to the process to check the clothing prepared before the weeks started to ensure things are done correctly before the week starts. Each child has a clock in the room, but none with loud alarms. Over the first weekend, I purchased three alarm clocks with blaring alarms and placed them across the room to ensure my kids would have to actually stand up and turn off the