Question

(a) Best Brains College wishes to buy a new machine for printing its examination materials. Details of the two machines under consideration are as follows:

C14 produces 7,500 copies of printed material in one hour.

C20 produces 7,800 copies of the material in one hour.  

The monthly energy requirement for C14 is 1,200 kilowatts and that for C20 is 1,400 kilowatts.

Each machine is programmed to work a maximum of 8 hours daily while the university works 25 days in a month.

Required:
(i). Compute the productivity of energy per day for each machine.

marks)

      (ii) If the decision to buy is based solely on the productivity of the machines, determine the one that should be bought by management of the college.     (1 mark)

(c ) The smooth flow of activities in an operations system is of primary concern to managers. However, these activities are often slowed down by bottlenecks.
     (i) With the aid of a diagram, explain how a bottleneck may reduce the flow of activities in an operations system.                    
(ii) Describe how each of the following may act as a bottleneck in an organization and suggest one way of removing each one of them:

Electricity supply

Shortage of raw materials

Management                            

                     

Answer 1

C14 produces 7,500 copies of printed material in one hour.

Number of copies C14 can print each day = 7500*8 = 60000

C20 produces 7,800 copies of the material in one hour.  

Number of copies C20 can print each day = 7800*8 = 62400

The monthly energy requirement for C14 is 1,200 kilowatts and that for C20 is 1,400 kilowatts.

Daily energy requirement of C14 = 1200/25 = 48 KW

Daily energy requirement of C20 = 1400/25 = 56 KW

Each machine is programmed to work a maximum of 8 hours daily while the university works 25 days in a month.

Required:
(i). Compute the productivity of energy per day for each machine.

Energy productivity = Total output/energy input

Productivity of energy per day for C14 = 60,000/48 = 1250 copies/KW of energy used.

Productivity of energy per day for C20 = 62,400/56 = 1114 copies/KW of energy used.

(ii) If the decision to buy is based solely on the productivity of the machines, determine the one that should be bought by management of the college.

If the management is solely depending on the productivity of machines, they should buy C14 as it can produce 1250 copies of prints using 1 KW.

C.

1- How a bottleneck may reduce the flow of activities in an operations system.   

Bottleneck processes in an operations system always reduce the flow of activities. Bottleneck can be defined as a process which has limited capacity and it can reduce the capacity of complete system.

In the process explained below, we can see that process 1 takes 4 minutes process the item in a shop floor and process 2 takes 5 minutes to process it and process 3 takes 3 minutes to process the item. So it is clear that process 2 takes more time compared to process 1 and process 3 and it has lowest capacity. So the complete process efficiency is dependent on Process 2. And we can call it as a bottleneck in this example.

2-

Electricity supply –If in an organization there is a shortage of electricity supply and there are other processes which is not dependent on electric supply to work such as manual work or cleaning, then in this scenario all other process in the process flow which doesn’t have any dependency on electricity will be delayed and electricity supply will be considered as a bottleneck. It can be removed by providing any other alternate source of electricity or by changing the process flow

Shortage of raw materials – If in an organization, there is a shortage of raw materials, it will completely slow down all other process in supply chain such as manufacturing, delivery etc. This bottleneck can be removed by providing any other alternate set of raw materials or allocate more resources to fetch raw materials.

Management – In any organization, lack of proper management resources will delay all approval processes and the final output will be delayed. This bottleneck can be handled by recruiting efficient managers.