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. Station Staffing Processing time (hours per chair per worker) Stripping 3 2.5 Priming 2 1.5 Painting 2 1 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 18 chairs arrives. How many hours will it take them to complete these 18 chairs? (The accuracy should be of two digits after the decimal places.)

Answer 1

Capacity = Staffing / Activity Time

* Stripping = 3/2.5 =1.2

* Priming = 2/1.5 = 1.33

* Painting = 2/1 = 2

* Inspection = 1/0.8 = 1.25

Here , Stripping would be the bottleneck since it has the lowest capacity

So, Process Capacity = 1.2 chairs/hour

Take almost (2.5+1.5+1+0.8) =5.8 hours for the first chair to be produced. It takes 1/1.2 hours for each of the subsequent chairs.

In total it takes  [5.8 + (1/1.2*17)] =19.96 hours to complete 18 chairs.

Ans :- 19.96 hours