The company Furniture Face Lift refinishes old wood furniture. Their process for refinishing chairs has 8 workers and 4 stations. Each chair starts at the Stripping station, then goes to Priming, then to Painting and finally to Inspection. Where there are multiple workers within a station, each worker works independently on his/her own chair. Assume inventory buffers are allowed between each station.
|
Station
|
Staffing
|
Processing time (hours per chair per worker)
|
|
Stripping
|
3
|
2.5
|
|
Priming
|
2
|
1.5
|
|
Painting
|
2
|
1.75
|
|
Inspection
|
1
|
0.8
|
a) What is the maximum number of chairs per hour that can be produced? Assume they start the day with inventory at each station to work on.
Process Capacity (chairs/hour)
b) Suppose at the start of the day there is no inventory of chairs in the shop. That is, there are no chairs within any of the stations or between them in any buffer. A truck loaded with 15 chairs arrives. How many hours will it take Furniture Face Lift to complete these 15 chairs?
c) Suppose now that each worker is trained to do all tasks and each worker works on a chair from start to finish, i.e., each worker does Stripping, Priming, Painting and Inspection. What is the maximum capacity of the process in chairs per hour?