Assignment task: The goal is to make a new model for drive-through vaccination sites capable vaccinating 10,000 people in two days. The process designed by the team consists of the following four steps:
I. Appointment verification. Upon arrival to the vaccination site, cars are directed to one of 6 lanes. In each lane, a line attendant verifies appointments and hands out welcome packets. This greeting stage takes an average of 20 seconds.
II. Registration. At the end of each lane, there are 3 staff members checking the patients in. (The total number of registration stations is therefore 18.) On average, the registration process takes 1 minute and 30 seconds.
III. Vaccination. After registration, cars are directed into one of 16 vaccination tents. Each tent has a team of two vaccinators who confirm identities, ask screening questions, manage vaccination supplies, and administer and document vaccines. With the two vaccinators working together, this process takes an average of 1 minute and 30 seconds for each patient.
IV. Observation. Once vaccination is completed, patients are directed to the observation site, where they will wait for 15 minutes before being discharged. There are a total of 505 parking spots available.
(a) Which one of the four steps is the bottleneck, and how many patients can this site vaccinate in each hour?
(b) The vaccination site planned to operate from 8am to 2pm each day. What is the demand rate (i.e. patients to vaccinate per hour), if 5,000 patients need to be vaccinated per day?
(c) The team is considering adding one volunteer to each of the 16 vaccination tents to help with screening questions and paperwork. This reduces the time each car spends at the vaccination tent from 1.5 minutes to 1 minute. What would be the new capacity of the process?
(d) Assume that the change in (c) is implemented. Which step is the new bottleneck, and what would you do to meet the demand of 5,000 patients per day?