Skyhigh Airlines is a small regional airline that was started by Tex Weston in West Texas in the 1980s. Tex was the first regional airline CEO to come up with the idea of developing a strategic partnership with a major carrier, which provided stability and a guaranteed market. In turn, Skyhigh developed a reputation for high reliability, on-time arrivals and departures, and safety. Like all domestic air carriers, Skyhigh’s fleet must be certificated by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), in order to fly domestic airline routes. Required avionic systems are on board all their airplanes, which must be inspected periodically, according to FAA reg-ulations. An avionic system normally includes several electronic “ boxes ” containing components essential to safe navigation of the aircraft. Some of these boxes are located in the cockpit, whereas other parts of the sys-tem are located in the tail of the plane, with cables connecting the components. There are five components in the avionic system on the typical airplane in Skyhigh’s fleet. A critical avionics maintenance procedure at Sky-high Airlines requires the assignment of five workers on each avionics crew for a full eight hours per day. All crew members are cross-trained and can work on any tasks necessary to complete the procedure. There are five tasks (A through E) that must be carried out, sequentially, in order to complete the procedure. Each task requires five labor hours to complete. Because of tight spaces in the aircraft, only three people can work on task A at the same time, while the remaining two are idle; four people can work on task B, with one idle; all five people can work on task C at the same time; two people can work on task D, with three idle; and four people can work on task E, with one idle.
Assignment
Address the questions below, and after doing so, state the general conclusions you can reach, and what advice would you give to management in a brief report.
1. Because each task requires five person hours to complete, determine how much elapsed time will it take to complete the entire procedure, consider-ing that work on the next task cannot begin until work on the previous task is completed?
2. What percent of time will be productive and what percent will be wasted on each task?
3. What is the rolled throughput yield (RTY) of the procedure?
4. If a tool could be developed which would allow all five workers to work on task D at the same time, how would that effect the RTY of the procedure?