Reading 2 Response: Jay Tyan

I feel like the general idea of this reading elaborated upon many of the points we have discussed in class, such as what production methods are suitable for certain volumes of production.  While reading, I also related some things I've learned on my own to the terms introduced here.  For example, I have a few Hot wheels cars that I've turned into flash drives and everybody's first reaction is "Woah, you could sell those!" Well, eh. I take it as a compliment, but I believe the type of manufacturing system I have with my own two hands is the simplest form of a job shop.  Everything is hand-cut, measured, and hot glue must be carefully applied, reapplied, and reapplied again.  The production process is very slow (typically takes a few hours to finish one car) and each car is a different model, so there's no point in creating a standard jig to speed things up.  Just like the article states, job shops are don't usually sell things for profit; they're usually there to build prototypes, and each car here is essentially a prototype for itself.

First one.  Same car, just repainted it after two years 

A few later, a '97 F-150 with a slide-out USB

The amount of time invested in hand-making these would make the price quite high, but the customer wouldn't get his/her money's worth due to the poor quality of workmanship.  In order for selling these to be a practical option, I'd have to at least expand to a project shop, having components made for me (many for one type of car), greatly reducing the assembly time and headache involved in getting these done.  At this level, even if I still had to gather all of the pre-produced parts and assemble them by hand, I'd be turning out one car every minute.  The only thing that prevents me from being able to do so is the prohibitively high cost of tooling and factories.  You see where this is going.

So no, I could not sell these.  ;)

To get back on topic, I'm sure we're all aware that our class so far has been using the robots in a job shop fashion.  All assignments are one-off pieces.  Sure, the robot helps with repetitive, "precise" tasks, but in the end, we as humans are still lining up foam boards by hand and placing nails by hand so the robot can grab them.  The human factor also greatly reduces the precision often associated with robots, as is evident in our nail project.  However, in a way, just like how ramping up production efficiency first necessitates high initial cost for tooling, the slow process of educating us students will more likely result in an overall boost in efficiency for relevant projects in the future.