There are four steps in the manufacturing process of a stuffed toy: cutting, stuffing, sealing, and packaging. There are two employees each for cutting and stuffing but one each for sealing and packaging. The processing times of cutting, stuffing, sealing, and packaging are 8, 5, 3, and 2 seconds per toy per employee.
a) What is the cycle time for stage “cutting” (in [min/unit])?
b) What is the cycle time for stage “sealing” (in [min/unit])?
c) Which stage is the bottleneck? What is the process capacity in [units/hour]?
d)If you can add one employee in parallel at the bottleneck stage, what should be the capacity of a new employee so that you increase the process capacity as much as possible?