Rite-Hite Products Corporation (RHPC), headquartered in Milwaukee, WI, is a world leader in the manufacture and sale of loading dock and industrial door safety products. Rite-Hite focuses on providing high-quality, compelling products and complete loading dock solutions that improve both facility safety and overall material handling productivity. Within RHPC, the Order Engineering (OE) Department is primarily responsible for all of the special “Designed-to-Order” products that flow through RHPC. These “specials” range from modifications (of widely varying degrees) of standard equipment, to combinations of various standard pieces of RHPC equipment as well as competitive and sister company components, to one-of-a-kind equipment that have never been built before and are often used as loss-leaders, special priced with moderate to deep discounts, to ”steal” business from the RHPC competitors or protect standard RHPC equipment sales from the same competitors. With a continual increase in new products within RHPC, the workload through the department has increased, from approximately 250 jobs in 1997 to an estimated 500-550 projects this year. In response to this increase in projects and additional pressures from the RHPC competitors and RHPC sales and customer base, a design-to-order process duration estimation and improvement mandate was handed down. In late 2002, a special Lotus Notes database system was developed to gather data on each of these projects to help come up with both a baseline for the average special project duration and a means for calculating better estimates for projected completion dates. Although nothing has been done with this data at this point in time, the system has become the central repository for all information related to every special project that flows through the company. The system is made up of 10 different “task” forms that each have a specific function, within the department, as described in Appendix A and all involve varying degrees of work based on the project type. The data that has been collected, within this database, consists of 13 elements, but the data set has been modified to include only those variables that are pertinent to our investigation and are described in detail in the Model section of this report.
The data set is real data collected over the last 2+ years and has been purged of faulted observations created by reopening an already closed observation (i.e. the database system cannot handle when a form is reopened and then saved after it has been closed because the open date will be later than the closed date) and consists of the general “statistics”.
