Floor-On, Ltd., operates a line that produces self-adhesive tiles. This line consists of single-machine stations and is almost balanced (i.e., station rates are nearly equal). A manufacturing engineer has estimated the bottleneck rate to be 2200 cases per 16-hour day and the raw process time to be 30 minutes. The line has averaged 1,500 cases per day, and cycle time has averaged 5 hours.
a) What is the estimated average WIP level?
b) How does the performance of the average throughput compare to the practical worst case throughput?
c) What would happen to the throughput of the line if we increased the capacity of bottleneck station and held the WIP at its current level?
d) If after process improvements the ten machines that required ten workers to run them are no longer needed. Instead five workers are now needed what would you do with the remainder of workers not working on that line anymore? (And please don’t fire them)