Question

Glenn Dental Clinic provides general dental care to residents of Philadelphia on a walk-In basis. The clinic has started receiving complaints from patients that the waiting time is too long and has asked you to Investigate whether this problem can be solved.

Upon arrival, customers receive a form from the receptionist and fill out relevant information such as personal health records and Insurance provider. The form is then handed back to the receptionist who enters the Information Into the computer system for the dentıst to see. A dental assistant then takes an X-ray from the patient. A dentist then performs the checkup and discusses any Issues with the patient.

Based on conversations with staff members at the clınic, you have obtained the following information on the process:

- It takes about 5 minutes for a customer to fill out the paperwork.

- Entry of Information on the paperwork Into the system and verification with past records takes another 5 minutes for a receptions There are two receptionists.

- It takes 15 minutes, on average, for the dental assistant to take an X-ray. There are three dental assistants on shift at any moment.

- There are 10 dentists working at the clinic. Each checkup takes 30 minutes, on average.

The following table summarizes the process data collected above.

Resource	Process	Staffing (Number of Workers)	Processing Time (Minutes per Patient)
A. Self-serve	Paperwork	-	5
B. Receptionists	Data Entry	2	5
C. Dental assistant	X-ray	3	15
D. Dentist	Checkup	10	30

This clinic has essentially unlimited demand. The dentists get paid  $100 per hour while the receptionists and dental assistants get paid $30 per hour.

 a. What is the labor content?

 b. What is the cost of direct labor?

 c. What is the labor utilization of the Receptionists?

 d. What is the labor utilization of the Dental assistants?

 e. What is the average labor utilization of the clinic?

 f. If they hired three additional workers and assigned each of them to one of the four resources, what would their capacity be (patients per hour)?

 g. What would be the capacity of this process (customers per hour) if they were able to integrate work between the dental assistants and the dentists? To be specific, they would have 13 workers doing the X-ray and checkup tasks with a total processing time of 45 minutes.

Answer 1