OPERATIONS

MANAGEMENT
PRACTICE QUESTIONS
 OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

OUTLINE

INTRODUCTION TO OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT .................................................. 2

Question 1 .............................................................................................................................. 2

BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYSIS ....................................................................................... 5

Question 2 .............................................................................................................................. 5

Question 3 .............................................................................................................................. 6

Question 4 .............................................................................................................................. 6

Question 5 .............................................................................................................................. 7

Question 6 .............................................................................................................................. 8

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INTRODUCTION TO OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Question 1

Nimble’s Bagel Bakery makes and sells a variety of bagels including plain, savoury, bacon
and relish, as well as assorted flavours of cream cheese. Bagels are the major sources of
revenue for the company.

The Bagel business is a $3 billion industry. Bagels are very popular with consumers. Not
only are they relatively low in fat, they are filling and they taste good. Investors like the
bagel industry because it can be highly profitable. It only costs about $.10 to make a bagel,
and they can be sold for $.50 each or more. Although some bagel companies have done
poorly in recent years, due mainly to poor management, Nimble’s business is booming; it
is number one nationally, with over 450 shops that sell bagels, coffee, and bagel sandwiches
for takeout or on-premise consumption. Many stores in the Nimble’s chain generate an
average of $800,000 in sales annually.

Production of bagels is done in batches, according to flavour, with each flavour being
produced on a daily basis. Production of bagels at Nimble’s begins at a processing plant,
where the basic ingredients of flour, water, yeast, and flavourings are combined in a special
mixing

machine. After the dough has been thoroughly mixed, it is transferred to another machine
that shapes the dough into individual bagels. Once the bagels have been formed, they are
loaded onto refrigerated trucks for shipping to individual stores. When the bagels reach a
store, they

are unloaded from the trucks and temporarily stored while they rise.

The final two steps of processing involve boiling the bagels in a kettle of water and malt
for one minute, and then baking the bagels in an oven for approximately 15 minutes.

The process is depicted in the figure below.

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Mixer Trays of Bagels

[[[

Shaper
Kettle Oven
Processing Plant A retail Store

Quality is an important feature of a successful business. Customers judge the quality of bagels
by their appearance (size, shape, and shine), taste, and consistency. Customers are also
sensitive to the service they receive when they make their purchases. Nimble’s devotes careful
attention to quality at every stage of operation, from choosing suppliers of ingredients, careful
monitoring of ingredients, and keeping equipment in good operating condition to monitoring
output at each step in the process. At the stores, employees are instructed to watch for deformed

bagels and to remove them when they find them. (Deformed bagels are returned to a processing
plant where they are sliced into bagel chips, packaged, and then taken back to the stores for
sale, thereby reducing the scrap rate.) Employees who work in the stores are care- fully chosen
and then trained so that they are competent to operate the necessary equipment in the stores
and to provide the desired level of service to customers.

The company operates with minimal inventories of raw materials and inventories of partially
completed bagels at the plant and very little inventory of bagels at the stores. One reason for
this is to maintain a high degree of freshness in the final product by continually supplying fresh
product to the stores. A second reason is to keep costs down; minimal inventories mean less
space is needed for storage.

1. Analyse this case study using the operating structures model. All critical areas of the case
study should be discussed in line with the structures of the model. These entails the
following;
a. The environment/domain
b. Control
c. Management
d. Inputs
e. Transformation Process

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f. Outputs
g. Support
h. Market/Customer
2. What type of manufacturing process is Nimble’s Bagel and why?
3. Discus briefly how you will manage the quality of bagels through the use of six (6) steps
of quality conformance to standards.

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BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYSIS

Question 2

Mr. K’s is a very popular hair salon. It offers high‐quality hair‐styling and physical relaxation
services at a reasonable price, so it always has unlimited demand. The service process includes
five activities that are conducted in the sequence described below.

(The time required for each activity is shown in parenthesis):

Activity 1: Welcome a guest and offer homemade herb tea. (10 minutes)

Activity 2: Wash and condition hair. (10 minutes)

Activity 3: Neck, shoulder, and back stress release massage. (10 minutes)

Activity 4: Design the hair style and do the hair. (25 minutes)

Activity 5: Check out the guest. (5 minutes)

Three servers (S1, S2, and S3) offer the services in a worker‐paced line. The assignment of
tasks to servers is the following:

S1 does Activity 1.

S2 does Activities 2 and Activity 3.

S3 does Activities 4 and Activity 5.

Required;

1. What is the maximum throughput (capacity) of each activity in isolation?

2. What is the bottleneck of the process?
3. What is the utilization of Server 2
4. To increase the service rate, Mr. K’s is considering two alternatives:
Alternative I: To hire a new employee to help anyone (and only one) of the servers
without changing the tasks performed by each server.
Alternative II: To redesign the assignment of tasks to servers. For this, Mr. K’s is
evaluating to reassign Activity 5 from S3 to S1.

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What would be the capacity of the process under each of the two alternatives?
Assume that the system operates at its capacity.
5. What is the cycle time of the total process?

Question 3

Furniture Face Lift refinishes old wood furniture. Their process for refinishing chairs has 8
workers and 4 stations. Each chair starts at the Stripping station, then goes to Priming, then to
Painting and finally to Inspection. Where there are multiple workers within a station, each
worker works independently on his/her own chair. Assume inventory buffers are allowed
between each station.

Activity time (hours

Station Staffing per chair per worker)
Stripping 3 2.5
Priming 2 1.5
Painting 2 1.75
Inspection 1 0.8

Required;

1. What is the maximum number of chairs per hour that can be produced? Assume they start
the day with inventory at each station to work on.
2. Suppose at the start of the day there is no inventory of chairs in the shop. That is, there
are no chairs within any of the stations or between them in any buffer. A truck loaded
with 15 chairs arrives. How many hours will it take them to complete these 15 chairs?
3. Suppose now that each worker is trained to do all tasks and each worker works on a chair
from start to finish, i.e., each worker does Stripping, Priming, Painting and Inspection.
What is the maximum capacity of the process in chairs per hour?

Question 4

The White Tooth Device Company is a manufacturer of high‐end electric toothbrushes. For
each toothbrush, there are a sequence of assembly steps performed by five workers. Each
worker does two tasks. Inventory buffers are allowed between workers.

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Worker Task Time (Seconds)

A T1 40
A T2 25
B T3 20
B T4 15
C T5 10
C T6 15
D T7 10
D T8 20
E T9 25
E T10 35

Required;

1. What is the capacity of this process (toothbrushes per minute)?

2. Suppose two workers could be hired, F and G, and they take the same time to complete
tasks as the current five workers. F and G can be assigned to worker on the same pair of
tasks as one of the current workers. For example, F could be assigned tasks T1 and T2 (just
like worker A) while G is assigned T5 and T6 (just like worker C). They cannot be assigned
tasks that are currently assigned to two workers. For example, F cannot be assigned to tasks
T2 and T3 (because they are currently being done by workers A and B). What is the capacity
of this process with workers F and G included (toothbrushes per minute)?
3. Return to the case of 5 workers. Suppose the assignment of tasks to workers can change
but the sequence of tasks must remain the same, workers must be assigned to consecutive
tasks and each task can be assigned to only one worker. For example, worker A could do
tasks T1‐T3 (because they are consecutive) but cannot be assign T1,T2 and T4. If worker
A is assigned to tasks T1‐T3, then worker B’s first task must be T4 (worker B cannot also
be assigned to task T3). What would the maximum capacity be after possibly reassigning
tasks (toothbrushes per minute)?

Question 5

The local Department of Motor Vehicles issues new licenses and renews licenses. (See the
diagram below.) The office receives 110 customers per hours. All customers first see a

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receptionist. The receptionist directs them in one of three directions. 75% go directly to Issue
License (staffed by 9 workers) where a new photo and license are done. 15% are required to
take an eye test (staffed by one worker) and 10% must first take a multiple‐choice electronic
written test (on one of three computers). Only 85% of people pass the eye test and the remaining
15% exit. The customers who pass the eye test proceed on to the Written Test. 10% of the
people who take the written test fail it, while 90% pass the test and then proceed to Issue
License.

75%

15% 15% Issue Licence

Reception Eye Test Exit Exit

10% 85%

Written Test 90%

10% Exit

Data on each station are provided in the following table:

Activity Worker Activity Time per

worker (min)
Reception 1 0.4
Eye Test 1 5
Written Test 3 15
Issue Licence 9 6
Required;

a. What is the utilization of the Receptionist (as a %)?

b. What is the implied utilization of Issue License (as a %)?

Question 6

The Yum and Yee food truck near the business school serves customers during lunch hour by
taking orders and making fresh batches of stir fry. Customers have only one choice during the
lunch hour, since the objective is to maximize the number of customers served. Assume that

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each customer places just one lunch order, and all lunch orders are the same size one unit of
stir‐fry.

The stir fry cooking works in this manner. First, a batch of orders is cooked in a wok by one

person. The cooking depends upon the number of orders in the batch. The time to cook just one
order is 3 minutes. For each additional order in the batch, it takes 0.5 minutes more to cook.
Thus, cooking two orders in a batch takes 3.5minutes, cooking three orders takes 4 minutes,
and so on.

The other process is bagging and accepting payments (done by a separate person), which
takes 0.80 minutes per order.

a. If Yum and Yee operates with batch sizes of 8 units, what is their process capacity (in
orders per minute)?
b. Calculate the batch size (in orders) that will maximize the overall flow rate (assume
there is ample demand)? Do NOT round the batch size (i.e., assume for this
calculation that a non‐integer batch size is possible).

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