13. Equipment Purchase and Replacement Strategy at the Fayette China Company

Matthew J. Drake, Duquesne University

Robert Ross is the plant manager at the Fayette China Company’s facility in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. Among his many responsibilities is the decision on when and how to replace the capital equipment used to manufacture the company’s iconic Shangri La line of dinnerware products. Much of the equipment in the facility is used heavily, and as a result, it must be replaced at a minimum approximately every ten years. Sometimes, however, it is replaced far more frequently than that if the costs of doing so can be justified.

One of the kilns in the facility has just come up for replacement, and the Fayette China Company’s executive board ...

Get Advances in Business, Operations, and Product Analytics: Cutting Edge Cases from Finance to Manufacturing to Healthcare now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.