Hotstone makes tires for the automotive market, Employees noticed that there is a great deal of congestion at the shipping dock as pallets of materials that had been picked in the warehouse were waiting to be moved by forklifts to outbound tractor-trailers. Warehouse stock-picking employees had to wait their turn , move the product onto the trucks and return to a distant location in the warehouse to pick-up another order to process. You have been assigned as a Lean Six Sigma project manager to improve this process.

Draw a diagram of the warehouse and loading dock and identify the possible root cause(s) of the congestion problem as stated in case.

Assume you have been assigned a Lean Six Sigma project manager to improve the process. Go through the DMAIC approach and identify how you would go about eliminating the problem. Include in your write up, data needed to identify the root cause of the problem.

Assume Hotstone is looking to make capital improvements to its manufacturing facility including the warehouse and shipping docks. Start with a clean sheet of paper and outline a design that might fix the congestion problem and then analyze your design using DFMEA principles (from Chapter 3).