Problems for class discussion on 2nd August

Q. 1. A small restaurant has 30 tables, each of which has a seating capacity of two
customers. When the guests arrive the manager guides them to seats. The
servers serve them; thereafter they pay their bill and leave. While giving the
seats to the customers the manager first tries to fill the tables with single
customers. If no such table is available then only a customer would be seated on
an empty table. The process is shown in the figure below with the operations
time given on the top of the figure and the delays between any two operations on
the bottom. There is one manager, one cashier, and four servers available.

Each individual deals separately with the servers and make his/her own
payment even if they come in groups. Further, as per the convention, one
customer is served by a single server only.

a) What is the capacity of the system and the bottleneck resource (Ignore
kitchen operations or the customer as the possible bottleneck)
b) What is the throughput time for each customer?
c) If there are 20 arrivals per hour, at a time how many tables are filled?

Q. 2. Anitas home delivery grocery store takes orders from 8 A.M to 8 P.M. She
wants to analyze the process and has provided the process flow diagram shown
below. There are three steps required to ship a customer order. The first step is to take
the order from a customer on phone. The second step is to pick the order for the
customer and then they have to pack the order ready for shipping. Anita maintains a
policy that all the orders received today would be shipped only tomorrow except for
the urgent orders which are shipped on the same day provided received before 4.00
PM. She charges a premium on the urgent orders @ 5% of the order value. The orders
are uniformly distributed in the 12 hours of receiving time. The store maintains a
policy that all the orders received on a day would be packed on the same day before
shutting the operations. There are ten managers who can receive the orders @ 10
orders per hour. Six persons are deployed to pick the orders. Each can pick the orders
@ 10 orders per hour. Ten workers are engaged in the packing operation where each
can pack @ 8 orders per hour.
 Custome Custome
r
Order r
Pick Pick Pack Wait
Taker Orders ed Orders for
Orders Ord Shippe

Find the following:

(a). What is the maximum possible daily output of the process?

(b). How long will the picking and packing operations have to work if we have a
day with the maximum orders?

(c). What is the maximum number of orders waiting to be picked? What is the
maximum number of orders waiting to be packed?

(d). If we increase the capacity of the bottleneck activity by 50% what impact
does this have on answers in parts b and c?

(e). If Anita wants to cut down the operational costs and layoff some staff, what
should be the starting point for that? Explain.

Q. 3. Judys cake shop makes fresh cakes to customers. The orders are received
by her sole assistant John, who takes 2 minutes per order. After receipt of the
orders, Judy takes 8 minutes to mix the ingredients for the cake and loads a cake
pan for baking. Then the cake is put into the oven for 30 minutes. The oven can
hold three cakes at one time. When the cake is taken out of oven it is cooled in
open air for one hour. The customized topping is done by Judy herself after the
cooling. Only two types of topping are done, chocolate-based topping takes 6
minutes and are ordered by 1/3rd of the total customers. Cream-based topping
takes 4 minutes and is ordered by 2/3rd of the total customers. After the topping,
assistant takes 2 minutes for packing. After the packing, billing and receipt of
payment is also done by the assistant, which takes 3 minutes.

What is the current daily production level assuming a seven hour

day?
What is the average throughput time for a cake?
What is the capacity utilization of the current system

If about four orders are received per hour what is the average
work-in-process inventory of the cakes.

Will the current system be able to deliver 50 cakes a day? If no then what need to
be done?