1. Evaluate the changes Dore-Dore has made in its children's knitwear division. How does the performance of the traditional operations and the cellular manufacturing system differ? For example, how does work-in-process inventory change when cells are implemented?
Traditional Operations: Under traditional operations, Doré-Doré’s production batch size in sewing, on average, was 200 pieces of the same style and color, with an average of eight different sizes within a batch. The knitwear sewing contained 55 sewing machines installed and was staffed by 42 workers (Exhibit 7). The additional machines were either specialty machines used for occasional operations or extra machines used in periods of peak demand. The sewing machine operators worked eight hours per day, five days per week. Sewing an average knitwear garment took 10 minutes of actual labor.
Cellular Manufacturing: Cellular manufacturing significantly reduced many types of waste present in the traditional sewing process and resulted in delivery time falling from 15 days to 1 day. Given a flow rate of 2,000 garments per day work-in-progress fell from 30,000 to 2,000 units, improving annual work-in-process turns from 16X to 240X. According to Exhibit 4, the work-in-progress inventory fell by an estimated 1.23FF million and holding costs by 275,000FF .
Comparison: The grid layout by machine type of the traditional system took no account of garment dependent workflow variability and resulted in the unnecessary movement of inventory. By contrast the garment-specific cell design reduced product movement and cross-trained operators who could switch tasks, which helped balance work-flow (Exhibit 6).

2. What changes are required to ensure successful implementation of cellular manufacturing? Is worker cross-training necessary?
Reorganization: The knitwear factory was currently organized by machine typ. For