Over time, it will be important to improve the console manufacturing process by streamlining certain aspects of the process. By doing so, the improved efficiency in process will translate to faster output of consoles. This in turn will serve to better meet ever increasing demands of consoles, maintaining good reputation with consumers, and ultimately driving more revenue.

While the 32 robots build the majority of a console, humans are required at the immediate beginning and tail end of the building process. At the beginning, a human has to place the motherboard into the console with a delicate touch that the robots do not have. At the end, when the console is fully built, a human takes the completed console off the line, places it neatly into the packaging, loads the packaging onto a pallet, and transports the full pallet to a storage warehouse. This end process can take up to 30 minutes to load a pallet and 15 minutes to transport the pallet to the warehouse, where they are then loaded onto shelves. By building a conveyor belt from the manufacturing site to the warehouse, the employees can load the packaged console onto the belt, and the belt can transport the consoles to the warehouse, where employees can offload the consoles from the belt to shelves in the warehouse. This process shaves off 25 minutes from the previous process. If a pallet holds 160 consoles, and it takes 45 minutes to load and transport a pallet, the new process allows for an extra 89 consoles to be packaged and sent to the warehouse in the same amount of time. In other words, the new process allows for the transport of almost 1.8 pallets every 90 minutes, as opposed to the old process’s 1.5 pallets every 90 minutes. The visualization below details the differences in output between the processes.