5BUS1199 Business Operations
Tutorial 6 – Process Analysis and Capacity Management
In Lesson 6, we discussed the concept of utilisation and different process performance
metrics. This tutorial exercise was designed to focus on how we may apply the concepts
learnt from the lecture to a real-life scenario.
A recently opened small fast food store sells take-away meals in the town centre at Hatfield.
We assume that 99% of the time customers order a set meal that includes a piece of
chicken, a box of salad and a cup of soft drink. The owner adopted a very simple multi-stage
process. There are two staff working at the store: an assistant and a kitchen staff. The
details of the task sequence and task details are shown in the figure below:
Please answer the following questions.
a. Find the hourly capacity of each staff, i.e. the maximum number of customer orders
can be processed per hour on his/her own.
b. Identify the bottleneck operation.
c. Determine the throughput time of the system and cycle time (i.e. time between
completions of orders).
d. Determine the hourly capacity of this production system.
5BUS1199 Business Operations
The owner understands that the current production process is not good at all. The store now
has four staff members: one assistant and three staff members working in the kitchen. The
following process flowchart details the production system and shows who performs what
task(s) and the average time each staff spends to finish a task that fulfils a customer’s order.
Note: These are parallel processes.
This will affect your throughput time
(or flow time) calculation.
Order taking and
bill the customer
Assistant (1 minute)
Chicken preparation
Salad preparation
Drinks preparation
Kitchen staff #1
Kitchen staff #2
Kitchen staff #3
(8 minutes)
(3 minutes)
(1 minute)
Pack the chicken, salad and drinks
and give the set meal to the
customer
Assistant (1 minute)
Please answer the following questions.
e. Find the hourly capacity of each staff, i.e. the maximum number of customer orders
can be processed per hour on his/her own.
f.
Identify the bottleneck operation.
g. Determine the throughput time, time between completion of orders, and hourly
capacity of the new system.