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Furniture Face Lift refinishes old wood furniture. Their process for refinishing

ID: 376860 • Letter: F

Question

Furniture Face Lift refinishes old wood furniture. Their process for refinishing chairs has 6 workers and 4 stations. Each chair starts at the Stripping station, then goes to Priming, then to Painting and finally to Inspection. Where there are multiple workers within a station, each worker works independently on his/her own chair. Assume inventory buffers are allowed between each station.

Station

Staffing

Processing time (hours per chair per worker)

Stripping

1

4

Priming

2

2

Painting

2

3

Inspection

1

0.8

What is the maximum number of chairs per hour that can be produced? Assume they start the day with inventory at each station to work on.(The accuracy should be of two digits after the decimal places.)

Please include explanation.

Station

Staffing

Processing time (hours per chair per worker)

Stripping

1

4

Priming

2

2

Painting

2

3

Inspection

1

0.8

Explanation / Answer

Effective processing time per chair for each station = Processing time per chair per worker/ Number of workers staffed

Thus ,

Effective processing time of STRIPPING station = 4/ 1= 4

Effective processing time of PRIMING station = 2/2 = 1

Effective processing time of PAINTING station = 3/2 = 1.5

Effective processing time of INSPECTION station = 0.8

It is the capacity of the Bottleneck station which decides the overall capacity of a process. The process with maximum processing time is the Bottleneck station which in this case is STRIPPING station .

Therefore , it can be said that process capacity is 4 hours per chair

Hence, maximum number of chairs per hour which the process can produce = 1 chair/ 4 hours = 0.25 chair/ hour

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF CHAIRS THAT CAN BE PRODUCED PER HOUR = 0.25

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF CHAIRS THAT CAN BE PRODUCED PER HOUR = 0.25