Project Readiness Package Rev 7/22/11
Introduction:
The primary objective of this Project Readiness Package (PRP) is to describe the proposed project by documenting requirements (customer needs and expectations, specifications, deliverables, anticipated budget, skills and resources needed, and people/ organizations affiliated with the project. This PRP will be utilized by faculty to evaluate project suitability in terms of challenge, depth, scope, skills, budget, and student / faculty resources needed. It will also serve as an important source of information for students during the planning phase to develop a project plan and schedule.
In this document, italicized text provides explanatory information regarding the desired content. If a particular item or aspect of a section is not applicable for a given project, enter N/A (not applicable). For questions, contact Mark Smith at 475-7102, .
Administrative Information:
· Project Name (tentative): / Sanitation Productivity Improvement· Project Number, if known: / P14711
· Preferred Start/End Semester in Senior Design:
Fall/Spring / Spring/Fall· Faculty Champion: (technical mentor: supports proposal development, anticipated technical mentor during project execution; may also be Sponsor)
Name / Dept. / Email / PhoneJohn Kaemmerlen / ISE / / 475-2767
For assistance identifying a Champion: B. Debartolo (ME), G. Slack (EE), J. Kaemmerlen (ISE), R. Melton (CE)
· Other Support, if known: (faculty or others willing to provide expertise in areas outside the domain of the Faculty Champion)
Name / Dept. / Email / Phone· Project “Guide” if known: (project mentor: guides team through Senior Design process and grades students; may also be Faculty Champion) John Kaemmerlen
· Primary Customer, if known (name, phone, email): (actual or representative user of project output; articulates needs/requirements) Mike Least ()
· Sponsor(s): (provider(s) of financial support)
Name/Organization / Contact Info. / Type & Amount of Support CommittedWegmans / Mike Least and Scott Young
Project Overview: 2-3 paragraphs that provide a general description of the project – background, motivation, customers, problem you’re trying to solve, project objectives. Because food safety is of primary importance to Wegmans, the use of proper sanitation practices (cleaning of equipment, “tools”, work areas, etc.) is also very important. Wegmans has guidelines and practices it requires its employees to follow, but they don’t have standard work for these practices developed to the extent that they’d like. One of the challenges in establishing consistent work standards, including consistent time standards, is the variability in the sanitation work tasks that occur day to day. For example, the preparation and baking of some products will create small amounts of materials that need to be cleaned, and other products will create a larger cleaning task. So there may be a day where the sanitation team members have x hrs of work to do in a work center, and tomorrow it could be 1.4x hrs. This can result in lost productivity that is hard to clearly see and capture in the form of increased time for production activities.
Wegmans would like a group of students to first establish solid documentation for the current state – processes, scheduling, times to complete tasks, staffing methods, etc. This will require a significant amount of work observation and data collection. They would like the students to characterize the product variety in some way, relative to the sanitation tasks that need to be completed. At one end is to say this task takes 40 minutes, no matter what the conditions, which is what they have now. At the other end of the continuum is to time and document every possible scenario. They students need to discover something in the middle – specific enough to different situations to be meaningful, but not so detailed that 100’s of hours of time study are required to cover every situation. There may be an analogy to product families that could be used, for example.
Once the current state and options have been articulated, the students need to design the future state – what are the processes? How should they be characterized and segmented? Are there improvement opportunities in the sanitation processes themselves? What time values should be associated with them? How do we continue to validate and update time values after the students complete the project? What should the staffing process be, one that leverages this data but is also practical? How do we insure the standard work is consistently followed? How do we leverage the added production time to gain productivity in the bakery? How does Wegmans acknowledge the productivity benefits, so the team members feel they are sharing the benefits from these improvements?
Detailed Project Description:
The goal of this section is provide enough detail for faculty to assess whether the proposed project scope and required skills are appropriate for 5th year engineering students working over two quarters. The sequence of the steps listed below may depend on your project, and the process is usually iterative, so feel free to customize. Emphasis is on the “whats” (qualitative and quantitative), not the “hows” (solutions), except for the section on “potential concepts,” which is necessary to assess the appropriateness of required skills and project scope. Not all of the information in this section may be shared with students. (Attach extra documentation as needed).
· Customer Needs and Objectives: Comprehensive list of what the customer/user wants or needs to be able to do in the “voice of the customer,” not in terms of how it might be done; desired attributes of the solution. Customer needs include:
o Documented time values for sanitation processes, properly characterized by situational aspects (work center, products run, etc.)
o Documented standard work
o Sanitation process improvements – documented, and at least some of them tried, possibly through kaizens or small projects
o Staffing model and process – likely a procedure, plus a database in Excel or a similar tool
o No adverse consequences in terms of food safety risks
o No negative ergonomic impacts (e.g. making people work harder, or creating injury risks)
o Consistency of use of the tools across crews and shifts
o Recommendations regarding how to sustain the use of the processes, the time values, the scheduling methods, etc., after the students complete the project and depart
o Documentation that enables effective training of people that come in new to the sanitation team
o Interact with Wegmans engineering, maintenance, and operations personnel early and continuously during the design and testing phases to insure the design and implementation approaches chosen are agreeable to the key stakeholders
o During MSD II, test and prototype as much of the new design as possible and practical, including soliciting team member and management feedback
o Deliver a bottom line business benefit, such as increasing the time available in Parbake for production from 19 hours per day to 20, as a result of better designed, planned, and executed sanitation work
· Functional Decomposition: Functions and sub-functions (verb-noun pairs) that are associated with a system/solution that will satisfy customer needs and objectives. Focus on “what” has to be achieved and not on “how”it is to be achieved – decompose the system only as far as the (sub) functions are solution independent. This can be a simple function list or a diagram (functional diagram, FAST (why-how) diagram, function tree). The function at a systems level deals with a management process for sanitation that works effectively. The students need to have a system that captures functions such as document work tasks, characterize work tasks, assign time values to work tasks, schedule sanitation workers each day, insure use of documentation in training, insure use of documentation in executing the work, enable monitoring of performance to schedule, enable corrective action if team is behind schedule, enable effective real time communication of plan vs. actual, etc.
· Potential Concepts: Generate a short list of potential concepts (solutions) to realize the system and associated functions. This may involve benchmarking or reverse engineering of existing solutions. For each concept and its associated function(s), generate a list of key tasks or skills needed to design and realize the function(s), and identify which disciplines (ME, EE, CE, ISE, …) are likely to be involved in the design and realization of the function(s). See the “PRP_Checklist” document for a list of student skills by department. Potential concepts, skills, and tasks should not be shared with students. The use of lean process improvement tools; use of excel or simulation as a scheduling tool; use of motivational tools; comparing visual scheduling vs. computer based; use of visual tools to track plan vs. actual work progress.
· Specifications (or Engineering/Functional Requirements): Translates “voice of the customer” into “voice of the engineer.” Specifications describe what the system should (shall) do in language that has engineering formality. Specifications are quantitative and measureable because they must be testable/ verifiable, so they consist of a metric (dimension with units) and a value. We recommend utilizing the aforementioned functional decomposition to identify specifications at the function/ sub-function levels. Target values are adequate at this point – final values will likely be set after students develop concepts and make tradeoffs on the basis of chosen concepts. Consider the following types of specifications:geometry (dimensions, space), kinematics (type & direction of motion), forces, material, signals, safety, ergonomics (comfort, human interface issues), quality, production (waste, factory limitations), assembly, transport/packaging, operations (environmental/noise), maintenance, regulatory (UL, IEEE, FDA, FCC, RIT). The primary spec, but not the only spec, is the gain in productivity – 20 minutes a day, 40 minutes a day, …? Another key spec is workforce scheduling can be done in less than ___ minutes per day. There are also the need for specs re: sanitation practices, food quality, ergonomic impacts.
· Constraints: External factors that, in some way, limit the selection of solution alternatives. They are usually imposed on the design and are not directly related to the functional objectives of the system but apply across the system (eg. cost and schedule constraints). Constraints are often included in the specifications list but they often violate the abstractness property by specifying “how”. Use “tools” that are easily accessible to Wegmans people, such as Excel. In documenting work, use any forms or templates Wegmans has for documenting standard work. Also, the students will need to make themselves available when the work is occurring at Wegmans, which is largely in the 6 to 10 pm timeframe.
· Project Deliverables: Expected output, what will be “delivered” – be as specific and thorough as possible. Documentation as described above; a scheduling tool; a table of time values for tasks, properly characterized by conditions, products, process specifics, etc.; improvement suggestions; pilot or full scale implementation of changes
· Budget Estimate: Major cost items anticipated. This project is not resulting in any build of devices, so the budget is essentially zero.
· Intellectual Property (IP) considerations: Describe any IP concerns or limitations associated with the project. Is there patent potential? Will confidentiality of any data or information be required? None anticipated. The students should not post in Edge, or otherwise share, any product cost or schedule information they are given access to, nor any proprietary process information.
· Other Information: Describe potential benefits and liabilities, known project risks, etc.
· Continuation Project Information, if appropriate: Include prior project(s) information, and how prior project(s) relate to the proposed project.
Student Staffing:
· Skills Checklist: Complete the “PRP_Checklist” document and include with your submission.
· Anticipated Staffing Levels by Discipline:
Discipline / How Many? / Anticipated Skills Needed (concise descriptions)EE
ME
CE
ISE / 4 / Process improvement, production control, time study, standard work development and documentation, work methods design, kaizen, regression, ergonoomics
Other
Other Resources Anticipated:
Describe resources needed to support successful development, implementation, and utilization of the project. This could include specific faculty expertise, laboratory space and equipment, outside services, customer facilities, etc. Indicate if resources are available, to your knowledge.
Category / Description / Resource Available?Faculty
Environment
Equipment
Materials
Other
Prepared by: / John Kaemmerlen / Date: / 8/15/13
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