1. How would you define the maximum capacity for the front desk of a hotel? What is meant by the effective capacity? Define the difference in these two terms relative to the number of customers that can be checked into the hotel in a given period.
2. Which would require a larger amount of excess capacity, a hospital emergency room or a doctor's office? Why?
3. Discuss the challenges that an operations manager can expect to encounter when applying the principles of process performance to the upstream (supply-based) section of a supply chain.
4. Which of the five activity categories is represented by each of the following actions?
• A person taking an order from you at a restaurant.
• A conveyor belt carrying your order to you at a store.
• Work waiting at a workstation.
• Parts in a bin that an operator is working on.
• The safe at your bank.
• A person setting up a workstation to process parts.
• The advisor at your college checking your transcripts over to make sure that you have enough credits to graduate.