Butterfly Edufields: Different Shades of Capacity

In April 2017, Butterfly Edufields Pvt. Ltd., in Hyderabad, India, was experiencing a rapid growth in demand and needed to find ways to expand its capacity to meet this demand without significantly increasing costs. The company created innovative teaching and learning products for students in grades 1 through 10. Working with these products hands-on helped students understand various mathematics and science concepts such as magnetism, light, and sound. The founder and chief executive officer asked the head of production and stores to evaluate the company’s existing production processes and capacity and to suggest options for improvement at a senior management meeting, scheduled for a week later.

This case can be used in a graduate-level course on operations management, or a strategic capacity management module. The case examines various operational, tactical, and strategic levers available to a company looking for creative options to increase production capacity while faced with constraints such as an inability to scale up manual operations, a lack of capital, and pricing flexibility. The case is deliberately light on quantitative data but emphasizes a number of intuitive, qualitative, and hierarchical aspects of capacity management decisions. It addresses daily challenges facing an operations manager in a small- or medium-sized enterprise and allows students to decide what additional data or assumptions will improve the quality of decision making. After completion of this case, students will be able to<ul><li>analyze manufacturing processes and calculate capacity;</li><li>identify tactical process improvement opportunities and explain how they affect capacity;</li><li>understand how an organization’s external relations with vendors and subcontractors can be leveraged to enhance capacity; and</li><li>appreciate the role of facility layout in capacity improvement.</li></ul>

• facility layout, capacity planning, process analysis