A small, privately owned Asian company is producing a private-label soft drink called Yoggo. A bottling line puts the soft drinks into plastic bottles and then packages the bottles into boxes. The bottling line is comprised of the following four steps: (1) the bottling machine takes 1 second to fill a bottle, (2) the lid machine takes 3 seconds to cover the bottle with a lid, (3) a labeling machine takes 3 seconds per bottle, and (4) the packaging machine takes 4 seconds to place a bottle into a box. Problem data are summarized in the following table.
Process Step Number of Machines Seconds per Bottle
Bottling 1 1
Apply a lid 2 3
Labeling 4 3
Packaging 3 4
A) what is the capacity (bottles/hour) at the resource "Apply a lid"?
B) What is the bottleneck in the process?
C) Assuming unlimited demand, what would be the flow rate?
D) Assuming unlimited demand, what would be the utilization at resource “Apply a lid”?
E) Assume the process started empty and that this is a machine-paced process. How long would it take to produce 500 bottles?
F) If each machine is run by one worker, and each worker is paid $10/hour, then what is the cost of direct labor?
G) What is the labor content?
H) Assume that the demand rate is 5000 units/hour, what is the target manpower?