Question

Joe Mataya’s company provides after-sales support for all the photo-copiers and high-load printers on our campus. When a machine fails, it is immediately brought to Joe’s workshop near Ozona’s on Greenville. The service (including ticketing) essentially consists of five steps, and each step is typically done by 1 person. The steps, with time required for each step in brackets, are: (i) Ticketing (15 min), (ii) Diagnosis (1 hr), (iii) Spare-part identification (30 min), (iv) Repair (2 hr) and (v) Assembly (90 min). Joe’s shop is open 8 hours a day. Assume there is no variability in processing times.

1. Draw a process flow diagram and identify the bottleneck in the repair process.

2. Suppose there are 800 machines all over campus. Each machine, on average, fails 9 times every year (300 working days). What should be the minimum capacity in Joe’s shop? What is the corresponding cycle time?

3. How many people (in round numbers) does Joe need for each of the above 5 steps?

Answer 1

1. Process flow diagram is in the snap below.

Bottleneck Process: It is the process that reduces the capacity of entire value chain. Here one process that takes the longest time to complete the process is called bottleneck process; hence Repair process that takes 120 min becomes bottleneck process.

2. Capacity interms of Attending failures/day based on available data are as below.

2 b. Cycle time

3. People requirements (not optimized)

Answer 2

1. Process flow diagram is in the snap below.

Bottleneck Process: It is the process that reduces the capacity of entire value chain. Here one process that takes the longest time to complete the process is called bottleneck process; hence Repair process that takes 120 min becomes bottleneck process.

2. Capacity interms of Attending failures/day based on available data are as below.

2 b. Cycle time

3. People requirements (not optimized)