DCRP K100D Review

[Don Williams]

Some time ago I wrote an article on trouble shooting production lines 
for an industrial giant that shall be nameless. I went to Germany and 
studied the lines day after day. I can tell you, without any 
qualification, that the tiniest error in placement of a component on an 
assembly line can cause the loss of dozens of products before an 
operator can intervene. A half hour breakdown could cost (in this 
particular factory) 100 000 Euro. Cameras are not like mobile phones -- 
which can be assembled almost completely by robots. Cameras need skilled 
human hands and lots of them. But many of the components such as circuit 
boards will be assembled by machine and probably somewhere else anyway. 
I'm not surprised cameras are expensive, only that they are not much 
more so. So Pentax must have thought this all out very carefully: 'To 
warehouse or not to warehouse? That is the question.'

Don

Mark Roberts wrote:
> P. J. Alling wrote:
>
>   
>> Pentax doesn't warehouse much in the way of product anymore. They  
>> build to fill orders.  
>>     
>
> Yep. It's SOP for Japanese companies (and many smart non-Japanese
> companies). It's called the Kanban system. I saw it in action in
> detail on a tour of a Dunlop tire factory a few years after the
> company was bought by the Japanese. It depends greatly on being able
> to quickly change production lines from one product to another, but in
> return you get to minimize your inventory of both raw material/parts
> *and* finished product.
>  
>   


-- 
Dr E D F Williams
www.kolumbus.fi/mimosa/
http://personal.inet.fi/cool/don.williams/
41660 TOIVAKKA – Finland - +358400706616