A small, privately owned Asian company is producing a private-label soft drink Y

Question

A small, privately owned Asian company is producing a private-label soft drink Yoggo. A bottling line puts the soft drinks into plastic bottles and then packages the bottles into boxes holding 10 bottles each. The bottling line is comprised of the following 4 steps: (1) the bottling machine takes 1 second to fill a bottle, (2) the lid machine takes 3 seconds to cover the bottle with a lid, (3) a labeling machine takes 3 seconds per bottle, and (4) the packaging machine takes 4 seconds to place a bottle into a box. When a box has been filled with 10 bottles, a worker tending the packaging machine removes the filled box and replaces it with an empty box. Assume that the time for the worker to remove a filled box and replace it with an empty box is negligible and hence does not affect the capacity of the line. Number of machines Seconds per bottle Process step Bottling Apply a lid Labeling Packaging 3 Bottling Labeling Packaging Apply a Lid The flow diagram is shown above Answer is complete but not entirely correct. What is the capacity (bottles/hour) at the resource "Apply a lid"? 1,200 bottles per a. hour b. What is the bottleneck in the process? Packaging c. Assuming unlimited demand, what would be the flow rate? bottles per hour Assuming unlimited demand, what would be the utilization at resource "Apply a lid"? 75 percent d. Assume the process started empty and that this is a machine- paced process. How long would it take to produce 500 bottles? 2,007 seconds

Explanation / Answer

Capacity at each process step (1/processing time)*3600 seconds per hour

a) Capacity of Apply a lid = (1/3)*3600 = 1200 bottles per hour

Capacity of Bottling = (1/1)*3600 = 3600 bottles per hour

Capacity of Labeling = (1/3)*3600 = 1200 bottles per hour

Capacity of Packaging = (1/4)*3600 = 900 bottles per hour

b) Capacity of Packaging is the lowest. Therefore, it is the bottleneck.

c) Given unlimited demand, Flow rate is equal to the capacity of the bottleneck resource = 900 bottles per hour

d) Utilization at resource Apply a Lid = Flow rate / Resource capacity = 900/1200 = 75 percent

e) As the process started empty, flow time for first bottle is 1+3+3+4 = 11 seconds. Thereafter a bottle is produced every 4 seconds until the 500th bottle. Therefore, total flow time for 500 bottles = 11 + 499*4 = 2007 seconds

This is the correct answer.

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