Consider an orthopedist’s office. All arriving patients first check in at a reception area where they fill out the necessary paperwork. On average, it takes 10 minutes to complete check-in and there are four receptionists working at the office. Then the patients are seen by a doctor. An average exam takes 30 minutes to complete and there are ten doctors working at the office. 60% of the patients do not need further evaluation after the exam and proceed to the reception area for check out. The remaining 40% require X-rays. X-rays are taken by the X-ray technician. It takes on average 20 minutes to process a patient at the X-ray machine and there are three X-ray technicians and three X-ray machines. Once the X-rays are complete, the patient is seen by a doctor again who finalizes the diagnosis by looking at the X-ray. It takes on average 22 minutes for the doctor to evaluate the X-ray and finalize the diagnosis after which the patient goes to the reception area for check out. It takes 5 minutes for a receptionist to check a patient out.
a) What is the capacity of the orthopedist’s office in patients/hour? Which resource is the bottleneck?