For this question consider hiring another worker and duplicating Operation C as
ID: 397520 • Letter: F
Question
For this question consider hiring another worker and duplicating Operation C as shown in the diagram
below. The two workers work on successive products; they don’t work on the same product at the same
time. The product still requires the five Steps (A, B, C, D, E).
a. What is the throughput time of the very first unit?
b. Working 8 hours a day, what is the daily capacity of the process? Where is the bottleneck now? What is the cycle time?
c. What is the amount of time needed to make one unit? (Imagine one person doing all of the above operations).
d. What is the capacity utilization of each of the 6 people in the above process?
e. What is the overall capacity utilization of the above process?
Explanation / Answer
Since workers work on successive products and don’t work on same product at the same time, we will assume total 6 workers deployed as per following plan :
Operation A = 1 worker
Operation B = 1 worker
Operation C ( with duplication ) = 2 workers
Operation D = 1 worker
Operation E = 1 worker
= Sum of time taken at A,B,C,D, and E
= 4 + 3 + 8 + 6 + 5 minutes
= 26 minutes
Subsystem 1 = Step A and Step B
Sub system 2 = Step C ( two in parallel)
Subsystem 3 = Step D
Subsystem 4 = E
Effective processing time at subsystem 1 = Higher of processing times of A and B = 4 minutes
Effective processing time of subsystem 2 = 8 /2 = 4 minutes
Effective processing time of subsystem 3 = 6 minutes
Effective processing time of subsystem 4 = 5 minutes
The bottleneck is subsystem 3 i.e. Step 3 since it has the maximum Processing time .
The cycle time of the system which is determined by the processing time of the bottleneck subsystem will be 6 minutes
Daily capacity of the process in an 8 hour ( 480 minutes ) day = 480 / 6 = 80 units/ day
= Sum of durations of all processes
= 4 + 3 + 8 + 6 + 5 minutes
= 26 minutes
Capacity utilization of B = 3/6 X 100 = 50%
Capacity utilization of C = ( 8/2) / 6 x 100 = 66.67%
= Sum of effective processing time of 4 subsystems / ( 4 number of subsystems x 6 minutes cycle time ) x 100
= ( 4 + 4 + 6 + 5 ) / ( 4 x 6 ) x 100
= 19 /24 x 100
= 79.17%
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