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Process Analysis Essay

Decent Essays

Practice #1
Solutions
Process Analysis and Capacity Management
BUAD311 – Operations Management

1. Dello is a world-class PC company. Management believes that they understand their products and customers better than any outsourcing company; therefore Dello should provide customer service in-house. Ideally, Dello’s customer service department wants to handle all the customer phone calls. During peak hours, however, Dello receives so many customer calls that they ask an outsourcing company, Telemate, to help handle incoming calls. Dello’s switchboard system is programmed in the following way; A customer calls Dello at its 1-800 number. If there are 14 or less callers in the system waiting to speak with one of the customer service …show more content…

Western Coffee also has two workers: worker C only takes order and payment, while worker D handles the coffee preparation and cleaning.

c) How many customers can Western Coffee serve per hour?

Capacity of worker C: 60/2 = 30 customers/hour Capacity of worker D: 60/(2+3) = 12 customers/hour Capacity of Western Coffee is 12 customers/hour

d) The manager of Western Coffee notices that cleaning is not a critical activity in the sense that it can be delayed and be finished when there are fewer customers. Therefore, during the peak hour when many customers come in, workers can focus on serving customers and temporarily ignore the cleaning activity. Then how many customers can Western Coffee serve during the peak hour?

Capacity of worker D during the peak hour: 60/2 = 30 customers/hour Capacity of Western Coffee is 30 customers/hour 5. At Spotted Cow Coffee Shop, one cashier can take 30 orders per hour and one skilled worker can prepare 20 orders per hour. Assume that the cashier and the worker are not cross-trained.

a. Suppose that there are only one cashier and one worker in Spotted Cow. What is the capacity of Spotted Cow? And which resource is the bottleneck? Explain.

The worker is the bottleneck as she pushes the smallest amount of job in an hour. The capacity of Spotted Cow is 20 orders per hour, which is

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