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 of the line to be 2,000 cases per 16-hour day and the raw process time to be 30 minutes. The line has averaged 1,700 cases per day, and cycle time has averaged 3.5 hours.
a) What would you estimate average WIP level to be?
b) How does this performance compare to the practical worst case?
c) What would happen to the throughput of the line if we increased capacity at a non-bottleneck station and held WIP constant at its current level?
d) What would happen to the throughput of the line if we replaced a single-machine station with four machines whose capacity equalled that of the single machine and held the WIP constant at its current level?
e) What would happen to the throughput of the line if we began moving cases of tiles between stations in large batches instead of one at a time?