If you add one employee in parallel at the bottleneck stage, what should be the
ID: 395680 • Letter: I
Question
If you add one employee in parallel at the bottleneck stage, what should be the capacity of a new employee so that you increase the process capacity as much as possible. (The bottleneck is cutting, should we consider stuffing (2.5 sec/unit) when we solve this question?)
re are four steps in the manufacturing process of a stuffed toy: cutting, stuffing, sealing, and packaging. There are two employees each for cutting and stuffing but one each for sealing and packaging. The processing times of cutting, stuffing, sealing, and packaging are 8, 5, 2.5, and 2 seconds per toy per employee. TheExplanation / Answer
Effective processing time of a process
= Processing time per unit/ Number of employees
Therefore ,
Effective processing time for Cutting = 8 /2 = 4 seconds
Effective processing time for stuffing = 5/ 2 = 2.5 seconds
Effective processing time for sealing = 2.5 seconds
Effective processing time for packaging = 2 seconds
The bottleneck stage is the one which has the maximum effective processing time .
Therefore, bottleneck stage is “Cutting”
If you add one employee with same capacity at cutting stage ( bottleneck stage) , the revised effective processing time of cutting will be = 8/3 = 2.66 seconds. The effective processing time of cutting operation still continues to be the highest and therefore continues to be bottleneck operation.
Besides cutting, the next bottleneck operations are stuffing and sealing each with effective processing time of 2.5 seconds. Thus if we take out cutting from being a bottleneck operation, stuffing and sealing will decided processing capacity of the whole operation.
To make effective processing time of Cutting < 2.5 seconds,
Number of workers required = 8/2.5 = 3.2 at least
Therefore , capacity of the new employee should be 1.2 times of other employees
Trust I have answered the question.
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