Question

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 and each station has inventory to work on at the beginning of the day
Station Staffing Processing time (hours per chair per worker)
Stripping 3 2.5
Priming 2 1.5
Painting 3 1.75
Inspection 1 0.8

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 10 chairs arrives. How many hours will it take them to complete these 10 chairs?

Answer 1

Answer:

13.19 hours

Explanation:

Station    Staffing     Processing time (Hours     Capacity = Staffing /

                                    per chair per worker)         Processing time

Stripping     3                            2.5                                   1.2

Priming        2                            1.5                                   1.33

Painting       3                            1.75                                 1.714

Inspection    1                            0.8                                  1.25

Stripping has the lowest capacity, hence it will be having bottleneck, thus the process capacity is 1.2.

Total time to produce the 1st chair = 2.5 + 1.5 + 1.75 + 0.8

Total time to produce the 1st chair = 6.55 hours

Time to produce subsequent chair = 1/1.2

Time to produce subsequent chair = 0.83 hrs

Total time taken to produce 10 chairs = 6.55 hours + 0.83 hrs*8 Workers

Total time taken to produce 10 chairs = 6.55 hours + 6.64 hours

Total time taken to produce 10 chairs = 13.19 hours