Operations Management OPMG

July-August 2017 Prof. Kesavan

Assignment 1 (20 points)

Note: This is an individual assignment. You may not discuss the solutions with
anyone else. Read chapters 3 and 4 to understand the concepts covered in these
questions. Partial credit considered only to questions worth more than 2 points.

1. Consider the following process to make chairs. There are three steps to making
the chair: a) make legs, b) make seat, c) assemble chair. Assume that it is
possible to make 8 legs per hour, 3 seat per hour, and assemble 2 chairs per
hour. What are: a) cycle time of this process and b) capacity of this process? ( 2
points)

Make
Legs
Wood
Assemble Finished
Chairs
Make
Seat
2. Consider a process consisting of three resources:

Resource Activity time Number of

workers
(min/unit)

1 10 2

2 6 1

3 16 3

What is the bottleneck? What is the process capacity? What is the throughput rate
if demand is 8 units/hour? What is the utilization of each resource if demand is 8
units per hour? (4)

3. At the drive through counter of a fast food outlet, an average of 10 cars wait in
line. The manager wants to determine if the length of the line is having an impact
on potential sales. Her study reveals that, on average 2 cars per minute try to enter
the drive-though area, but 25% of the drivers of these cars are dismayed at the
long line and simply move on without placing orders. Assume that no car that
enters the line leaves without service. On average, how long does a car spend in
the drive-through line? (3 points)

4. At ISB cafeteria, 280 students use a cafeteria daily for lunch and must pass
through the cashier section during the first forty minutes of their lunch break.
a) If students pass through the cashier section at a uniform rate, what is the target
cycle time for the cashier station? (2 points)
b) If it takes 15 seconds for a cashier to process a student, how many cashiers are
needed? (2 points)
6) A Gantt chart representation of a schedule is shown in the next picture. Suppose that
there are two steps in the process, with step 1 preceding step 2. Two jobs Job A12 and
Job B23 are produced in the following way:

Step 1 Job A12 Job B23

Step 2 Job A12 Job B23

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Days

i) When is Job A12 completed? What is Job B23 completed? (1 point)

ii) When will a new Job C34 that is waiting in Queue be completed? Assume
that C34 also needs to go through Steps 1 and 2. (1 point)
iii) Were the machines in step 1 or 2 blocked? or were they starved during the
processing of C34? Explain. (1 points)

7) Consider a software company where every project needs to go through the following
stages: a) analyst; b) UI designer; c) Code; and d) Systems Testing sequentially.
Following are the cycle times for each of those stages: Analyst = 45 days; UI designer
= 30 days; Code = 40 days; and Systems Testing = 35 days.

a) What is the capacity of the system? What is the cycle time of the system (2 point)
b) Your boss asks you to speed-up the operations and offers to add one member to
your team. Will you pick an analyst, UI designer, Coder, or Systems Tester? (1
point)
c) What will be the new cycle time of the system? (1 point)