<p>In today‟s manufacturing environment, different parts manufactured in-house and bought from suppliers are often assembled together into a finished product. Competition has made it very important for companies to deliver a customized product on a promised date. However, when inventory items are missing at the time of production, lead times for products become uncertain and this makes it difficult to fulfill a customer order on the promised date. It is thus important to explore the causes of missing items at the time of production in order to solve such a problem. This Master of Science thesis carried out through a case study at Fläkt Woods in collaboration with Jönköping University is about the problem of not finding specific inventory items in the locations specified by the computer system. It is delimited to inventory items which are physically within the company premises or which according to the computer system are within the premises of the company. The questions at issue have been what the causes of the problem of missing items within the company are and how to effectively reduce the problem. The thesis has been carried out over an entire academic semester as a full-time work in the company. The sources of the problem have been found to be the result of the work procedure, the underlying software used during work (the in-house developed ERP system), stealing from orders, ineffective barcode scans, re-sequencing at the component manufacturing department (called pre-manufacturing in the company) due to the need to fulfill multiple objectives, set-up times at the component manufacturing department and human errors among others. The suggestions given include: modification of the work procedure and the underlying software used at work, increasing effective scanning and using some checks at critical points in the material flow. Areas for further research are given to further reduce the impact of the problem on the production system.</p>

The intention of implementing technology into healthcare practices is to reduce opportunity for errors in the delivery of providing health care. However, errors still occur, and many times are preventable. Configurations of health information technology systems should match clinical workflows to promote usage as intended. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to evaluate the impact of revised system configurations and use of a blood product transfusion system for the administration of blood products after one year of implementation. The method of heuristic evaluation is a usability engineering method for finding problems in a user interface design with the input of a small workgroup of subject matter experts. The project site had experienced reported incidents of blood product administration error as well as problems with systems communication since the implementation of the blood transfusion system. There were 31 nurse clinical educator staff users of the system who completed a survey evaluation of their perceptions of the blood transfusion system before and after configuration changes. The findings revealed that the mean quality and productivity score after the system configuration occurred was significantly higher than the mean score prior to the system configuration change, t (30) = -7.93, p < .001. The correlation between the one survey was also statistically significant, r = .46, p = .009. This project supports positive social change by reducing the potential for error for system users in the process of the blood administration process through heuristic evaluation through the implementation of changes to the technological system.

In today‟s manufacturing environment, different parts manufactured in-house and bought from suppliers are often assembled together into a finished product. Competition has made it very important for companies to deliver a customized product on a promised date. However, when inventory items are missing at the time of production, lead times for products become uncertain and this makes it difficult to fulfill a customer order on the promised date. It is thus important to explore the causes of missing items at the time of production in order to solve such a problem. This Master of Science thesis carried out through a case study at Fläkt Woods in collaboration with Jönköping University is about the problem of not finding specific inventory items in the locations specified by the computer system. It is delimited to inventory items which are physically within the company premises or which according to the computer system are within the premises of the company. The questions at issue have been what the causes of the problem of missing items within the company are and how to effectively reduce the problem. The thesis has been carried out over an entire academic semester as a full-time work in the company. The sources of the problem have been found to be the result of the work procedure, the underlying software used during work (the in-house developed ERP system), stealing from orders, ineffective barcode scans, re-sequencing at the component manufacturing department (called pre-manufacturing in the company) due to the need to fulfill multiple objectives, set-up times at the component manufacturing department and human errors among others. The suggestions given include: modification of the work procedure and the underlying software used at work, increasing effective scanning and using some checks at critical points in the material flow. Areas for further research are given to further reduce the impact of the problem on the production system.