Saint Vincent College of Cabuyao

Brgy. Mamamtid, City of Cabuyao, Laguna

Operations Management

Quiz 1

Name: Score:
Course & Section: Date:

Problem 1

The management at Sell Right grocery stores wishes to estimate the amount of time that
customers are spending, on average, in its stores and in a checkout line. The most obvious
approach for determining this information is to simply record when a customer enters and exits
the store. However, it is difficult to track the entering and exiting times of specific customers.
We will look at an alternative method. Over the past two weeks, the following data have been
collected at Sell Right’s newest store during busy hours (this Sell Right is rather large and
typically has 7 open checkout lanes):

Results of Data Collection

Avg. rate of customers entering store 305/hr.
Avg. # of customers in store 146
% of customers who do not make purchase 5%
Avg. # of customers in checkout lanes 24

As their consultant, you have been asked by Sell Right’s management to address the following
questions:
1. How much time does the average customer spend in the store?
2. How much of that total time is spent waiting, on average, to check out?
3. What effect might increasing the number of open lanes from 7 to 8 have on each of the
four measures collected? Provide qualitative answers.

Problem 2

Quotable manufactures a removable disk for PC’s. There are four major stages in its
manufacture. The first stage is coating of disks. Coating is done by an automated machine that
can run 24 hours/day. It produces 100 disks/hour. The second stage is assembly of the disk into
the case. Assembly takes the average worker 2 minutes/disk. There are 10 workers at this stage.
The third stage is testing, which catches defects from the coating operation. Each testing machine
takes 5 minutes to test a disk. There are 30 machines and enough operators to keep these
machines busy if necessary. The fourth stage is labelling the disk. Each worker here can do 2
disks/minute. There are 3 workers who do this task.
Assume the workforce completes 8 full hours of work each day, and stages 2 through 4 run 8
hours/day. Demand is 2100 disks/day.

Assume all rates and times are deterministic (no variability in demand or production)
For (a) and (b) assume 100% quality. Testing finds no defects.

1. Fill in the table below

Stage Resource Time (minute/ Rate for one Rate for all
disk) (disk/ hr.) resources at
stage (disk/ day)
A.
B.
C.
D.

2. Explain why there is sufficient capacity to meet demand.

3. Assume that exactly 10% of the disks from a day’s production of the coating stage are
defective. Is there still sufficient capacity to meet demand? Show your work. For parts (d)
and (e) continue to assume that there is a 10% defective rate at the coating operation.
4. Is a reduction in this fulltime workforce possible if assembly and labeling are combined
into a single step? Total raw processing time for one disk does not change. Assume
testing is done after this new combined step. Show your work.
5. Is there a workforce reduction possible if testing is moved directly after coating and
assembly and labeling are combined into a single operation? Show your work.

Problem 3

For this problem assume all times and rates are deterministic and there is a reasonablem amount
of buffer between stages.

Stage 1 has a single resource.

Stage 2 has 3 resources. The job needs to visit only one of them, so these three work in parallel.
The times the individual resources require are given.

Stage 3 has a single resource

Stage 4 is only required of 20% of the units.

Stage 5 has a single resource that handles both the 20% of the units that go through stage
4 at the rate of 6/hr. and the 80% of the units that don’t go through stage 4 at a rate of 15/hour.
 1. Compute the capacity of total resources at each stage. Assume that the input consists of
one item that requires stage 4 followed by four that do not require stage 4. Assume this
pattern repeats.

Stage Calculation (If necessary) Capacity of resource at stage

2. Bottleneck is stage

3. The maximum production rate of the system is