A manufacturing company in town operates two shifts a day and the available time per shift is 420 minutes.
The production line makes 300 parts of A and 600 parts of B per day for two shifts and the processing times are 25 and 20 seconds per respectively for parts A and B. The official changeover time = 50 minutes. Assume the shift starts with a setup to process part "A".
Determine
a. the smallest batch size possible for each of parts A and B. You may assume the number of setups for part "B" will be twice as many as of part "A".
b. To produce in smaller lot sizes, a continuous improvement team has reduced the changeover time to 15 minutes.
Assuming the same number of setups are made for both the parts with the new changeover time, determine the batch size and the number of setups required for each of the two parts.