A new Yum and Lee food truck near the business school serves customers during lunch hour by taking orders and making fresh batches of stir fry. Customers have only one choice during the lunch hour, since the objective is to maximize the number of customers served. Assume that each customer places just one lunch order, and all lunch orders are the same size -one unit of stir-fry. The stir-fry cooking works in this manner: First, one Yum and Lee employee cooks a batch of orders in a wok. The cooking depends upon the number of orders in the batch. The setup time + process time to cook just one order is 3 minutes. For each additional order in the batch, it takes 0.5 minutes more to cook. Thus, cooking two orders in a batch takes 3.5 minutes, cooking three orders takes 4 minutes, and so on. The other process is bagging and accepting payments (done by a separate employee), which takes 0.5 minutes per order. There are two cooks (who are identical and work in exactly the same way) and one person bagging and accepting payments.
Suppose food regulations require that the cooking woks must be cleaned periodically. That is, after every 24 minutes of use, each wok needs soaking in soap water and cleaning for a total of 6 minutes before the wok can be reused. How does this wok cleaning affect the process capacity? If the process capacity does not change due to the cleaning requirement, explain why and if it does, explain two ways to eliminate any detrimental effects on process capacity during the lunch hour.