Suppose you and your friends decide to open an Easter Egg decorating stall. You decide on a three-station line with one person at each station. Upon completion of time studies, you find the average processing times on stations 1, 2, 3 are 15, 12 and 14 minutes, respectively. However, the worker at station 2 is subject to random days off which cause that station’s fraction of uptime (availability) to be only 75 percent.
(a) Which station is the bottleneck of this line?
(b) What are the bottleneck rate rb, raw process time T0 and critical WIP W0 for the line?
(c) If availability of station 2 is reduced to 50 percent, what happens to the critical WIP W0? Briefly describe the likely impacts of this change.