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C&A Cleaner uses a five-step process to dry clean garments: Process Description

ID: 351423 • Letter: C

Question

C&A Cleaner uses a five-step process to dry clean garments:

Process

Description

Time (minutes)

# of Workers

Tagging

Attach a number tag on garments for tracking purposes.

1 per garment

1

Stain pretreatment

Identify stains on garments and apply chemicals on the site of a stain.

5 per garment

2

Dry cleaning

Place garments in a large drum machine where water-free solvents are used to remove traces of dirt and oil.

50 per batch

n/a

Spot cleaning

Identify and remove stains that did not come out earlier.

10 per garment

5

Finishing

Press garments and retag them before placing them in bags for pickup.

4 per garment

2

A garment piece weights 1 pound on average. What is the capacity of C&A’s entire dry cleaning process in pounds of garments per hour if the batch size is 10?

O1

O0.5

O0.4

O0.2

Please be as detailed as possible in your explanation. Thanks a bunch!

Process

Description

Time (minutes)

# of Workers

Tagging

Attach a number tag on garments for tracking purposes.

1 per garment

1

Stain pretreatment

Identify stains on garments and apply chemicals on the site of a stain.

5 per garment

2

Dry cleaning

Place garments in a large drum machine where water-free solvents are used to remove traces of dirt and oil.

50 per batch

n/a

Spot cleaning

Identify and remove stains that did not come out earlier.

10 per garment

5

Finishing

Press garments and retag them before placing them in bags for pickup.

4 per garment

2

Explanation / Answer

If a process has just 1 server/worker, capacity = 1/activity time

If a process has m servers/workers, capacity = m/activity time

Capacity of Tagging= 1/1=1unit/min

Capacity of Stain pretreatment= 2/5=0.4 unit/min

Capacity of spot cleaning= 5/10=0.5 unit/min

Capacity of finishing=2/4=0.5 unit/min

Bottleneck is the process with the most taking time capacity,

In this case, tagging takes the most capacity, so it is the bottleneck process.

The capacity of entire process depends on the bottleneck process, hence the capacity of C&A’s entire dry cleaning process is 1.