Question

Gilmore Framing (GF) specializes in framing artwork for mid-sized commercial projects. Its clients are largely brokers who contract to provide “art” to decorate new or renovated hotels. The brokers send the unframed artwork to GF to mount and frame.

The process at GF involves two steps, Frame Construction and Mounting. There is one Frame Construction Station and one worker at Mounting.

The Frame Construction Station handles the artwork in batches. The batch size is set to be 12 pieces of artworks/batch. A 5-minute setup for each piece of art is required before the batch processing. Then the frames for the whole batch of artworks will be constructed all together, which takes on average 1.5 hours. These 1.5 hours processing time does not change when the batch size changes.

At Mounting, art pieces are matted and placed in a frame. Mounting is largely a manual operation and does not require a set up. The worker at the mounting finishes one piece of artwork in 10 minutes.

Please use the information provided to answer the following 7 questions.

1. Which kind of batching the Frame Construction Station is doing?

A. Sequential Batching B. Simultaneous Batching

2. The stage capacity of Frame Construction is ______ pieces/hour? (Keep one decimal in your answer.)

3. The stage capacity of Mounting is _______ pieces/hour.

4. The bottleneck of the process is ______.

A. Frame Construction B. Mounting

5. If the demand to the process is 5 pieces of artworks/hour, the flow rate is ______ pieces/hour.

6. If the demand to the process is 4 pieces of artwork/hour, the stage utilization of Frame Construction is _______; the stage utilization of Mounting is _______.

A. 66.7%; 80% B. 83.3%; 80% C. 83.3%, 66.7% D. 66.7%, 80%

7. Please indicate which of the following CANNOT improve the process capacity.

A. Increase the batch size at Frame Construction.

B. Add one more worker to Mounting.

C. Reduce the setup time at Frame Construction.

D. None of the above.

Answer 1

1)The correct answer is option B. Simultaneous batching since are frames are constructed togther in a batch.

2)The correct answer is 7.57 pieces /hr . Since 12 pieces are done in 1.5 hrs plus 5 mins set up time, in 60 minutes, there will be 7.57 pieces per hour.

3)The stage capacity of mounting is 6 pieces per hour.

4.The bottleneck of the process is Option B. mounting process which has less output of 6 pieces per hour than that of frame cosntruction stage which has output of 7.57 pieces per hour.

5) The flow rate is 6 pieces per hour since that is the bottleneck flow rate.

6)The correct answer is Option C. 83.3%, 66.7%. (4/6=66.7%)

7. Option D. None of the above.