Question

Mr. K’s is a hair salon whose service process includes six activities conducted in the sequence described below. (The time required for each activity is shown in parentheses):

Activity 1: Welcome guests and serve herb tea.   (10 minutes)

Activity 2: Offer styling suggestions.   (15 minutes)

Activity 3: Condition hair.   (10 minutes)

Activity 4: Do the hair. (30 minutes)

Activity 5: Wash hair. (10 minutes)

Activity 6: Check out the guest. (5 minutes)

Three servers (S1, S2, and S3) offer the services in a worker-paced line. The assignment of tasks to servers is as the following:

S1: Activity 1 and Activity 2.

S2: Activity 3 and Activity 4.

S3: Activity 5 and Activity 6.

F) Now assume that the demand has surged to 6 customers per hour. What is the average labor utilization (in %) of the servers?

G) Assume that Mr. K’s pays each worker an hourly wage of $18 per hour. What is the cost of direct labor in [$/customer] when the demand is 6 customers per hour?

H) One morning when the salon opened, 5 customers were waiting to receive service. How long (in minutes) will it take to finish serving these 5 customers starting from the empty service process? Recall that the process is a worker-paced line.

Answer 1