Process Structure Challenge 1

Excercise to design a robust process

Case description:

  • You are a carpenter, manufacturing windows and wooden door frames.
  • Customers tend to shop around and ask price-quotations at many different competitors. Making price-calculations is a time consuming job.
  • You decide to make a quotation-module on the internet: The customer answers the questions you would normally ask him, and gets his quotation a quickest possible way.
  • Any frame will get a quotation! Square, rectangular, unequal shapes, with or without turning windows… As long as they are made of wood!

Basically the manufacturing process consists of:

  1. Making wooden profiles
  2. Making joints (a simple window is 4 profiles and 4 joints)
  3. Apply rotating- and locking mechanisms

Questions:

What are the parameters you will have to question the customer upon?

How does the process to finally calculate the correct price look like?

Make a solid Process Structure Diagram.

To give you some idea about similar situations in real life, look at those two examples (that do not handle any situation!)

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