A decision support system model in estimating budgets for standard figure tools at Mattel Toys

Mattel Toys is a leading toy manufacturing company and Barbie is one of Mattelʹs major product lines. Mattel develops several variations of the toy every year which requires many duplicate tools for standard figure parts and tools for parts similar to the standard parts. The tooling engineer estimates the type of tools and the number of tools to be built to support a given production rate. This estimate, represented in a tool plan is carried out manually, giving rise to inaccuracies. A decision support system was developed to estimate the number of duplicate tools as well as the budgets to build these tools. The decision support system was checked for accuracy by conducting a case study.