Concept explainers
Question
☆New England Foundry
For more than 75 years, New England Foundry, Inc. (NEFI), has manufactured wood stoves for home use. In recent years, with increasing energy prices, president George Mathison has seen sales triple. This dramatic increase has made it difficult for George to maintain quality in all his wood stoves and related products.
Unlike other companies manufacturing wood stoves, NEFI is in the business of making only stoves and stove-related products. Its major products are the Warmglo I, the Warmglo II, the Warmglo III, and the Warmglo IV. The Warmglo I is the smallest wood stove, with a heat output of 30,000 BTUs, and the Warmglo IV is the largest, with a heat output of 60,000 BTUs.
The Warmglo III outsold all other models by a wide margin. Its heat output and available accessories were ideal for the typical home. The Warmglo III also had a number of other outstanding features that made it one of the most attractive and heat-efficient stoves on the market. These features, along with the accessories, resulted in expanding sales and prompted George to build a new factory to manufacture the Warmglo III model. An overview diagram of the factory is shown in Figure D.6.
Figure D.6 Overview of Factory
The new foundry used the latest equipment, including a new Disamatic that helped in manufacturing stove parts. Regardless of new equipment or procedures, casting operations have remained basically unchanged for hundreds of years. To begin with, a wooden pattern is made for every cast-iron piece in the stove. The wooden pattern is an exact duplicate of the cast-iron piece that is to be manufactured. All NEFI patterns are made by Precision Patterns, Inc. and are stored in the pattern shop and maintenance room. Next, a specially formulated sand is molded around the wooden pattern. There can be two or more sand molds for each pattern. The sand is mixed and the molds are made in the molding room. When the wooden pattern is removed, the resulting sand molds form a negative image of the desired casting.
Next, molds are transported to the casting room, where molten iron is poured into them and allowed to cool. When the iron has solidified, molds are moved into the cleaning, grinding, and preparation room, where they are dumped into large vibrators that shake most of the sand from the casting. The rough castings are then subjected to both sandblasting to remove the rest of the sand and grinding to finish some of their surfaces. Castings are then painted with a special heat-resistant paint, assembled into workable stoves, and inspected for manufacturing defects that may have gone undetected. Finally, finished stoves are moved to storage and shipping, where they are packaged and transported to the appropriate locations.
At present, the pattern shop and the maintenance department are located in the same room. One large counter is used by both maintenance personnel, who store tools and parts (which are mainly used by the casting department), and sand molders, who need various patterns for the molding operation. Pete Nawler and Bob Dillman, who work behind the counter, can service a total of 10 people per hour (about 5 per hour each). On average, 4 people from casting and 3 from molding arrive at the counter each hour. People from molding and casting departments arrive randomly, and to be served, 1hey form a single line.
Pete and Bob have always had a policy of first come, first served. Because of the location of the pattern shop and maintenance department, it takes an average of 3 minutes for an individual from the casting department to walk to the pattern and maintenance room, and it takes about 1 minute for an individual to walk from the molding department to the pattern and maintenance room.
After observing the operation of the pattern shop and maintenance room for several weeks, George decided to make some changes to the factory layout. An overview of these changes appears in Figure D.7.
Figure D.7 Overview of Factory after Changes
Separating the maintenance shop from the pattern shop would have a number of advantages. It would take people from the casting department only 1 minute instead of 3 to get to the new maintenance room. The time from molding to the pattern shop would be unchanged. Using motion and time studies, George was also able to determine that improving the layout of the maintenance room would allow Bob to serve 6 people from the casting department per hour; improving the layout of the pattern department would allow Pete to serve 7 people from the molding shop per hour.
1. How much time would the new layout save?
Want to see the full answer?
Check out a sample textbook solutionChapter D Solutions
Mylab Operations Management With Pearson Etext -- Access Card -- For Operations Management: Sustainability And Supply Chain Management (13th Edition)
- QUESTION 4 In an effort to reduce energy costs, a major university has installed more efficient lights as well as automatic sensors that turn the lights off when no movement is present in a room. Historically, the cost of lighting an average classroom for 1 week has been $265. To determine whether the changes have signficantly reduced costs, the university takes a sample of 50 classrooms. They find that the average cost for 1 week is $247 with a standard deviation of $60. When testing the hypothesis (at the 5% level of significance) that the average energy use has decreased from the past, what is your conclusion concerning the null hypothesis? Reject the null hypothesis Fail to reject the null hypothesisarrow_forwardQuestion 8 Central Perk orders their organic coffee filters from a South American supplier that mails them as inexpensively (hence, as slowly) as possible. Central Perk uses 80 filters a day with a standard deviation of 5 filters per day. It would be disastrous if they ran out of these filters, years ago customers caught them using paper towels from the men's room and business suffered. They have set their service level at 99% in hopes of avoiding a similar situation. It takes 14 days to receive a shipment and the standard deviation of the shipping time is two days. What is their reorder point? A) 1120 filters B) 1496 filters C) 1515 filters D) 1450 filtersarrow_forwardQuestion 2 Mr. Ferdinand is a well known entrepreneur who sells fresh organic beef to persons in the local community. Customers love the quality of meet that Mr. Ferdinand sells so they tend to recommend his product to other persons. Recently, Mr. Ferdinand has been rumning out of beef to sell to his customers. One customer suggests to him that he must use past sales records to forecast demand for his beef so that he can meet his customers demand. Using a numerical example, demonstrate to Mr. Ferdinand how he can use a three- week and a four-week weighted moving average to forecast demand for his beef. I. II. Show how Mr. Ferdinand can test the accuracy of his forecast. III. Explain to Mr. Ferdinand two ways in which he can benefit from doing forecast for his beef. 日正arrow_forward
- Question Completion Status: QUESTION 1 List nested geographic units used by the United States Census Bureau in order from largest to smallest. v Blocks v States v Block groups v Counties v Tracts Nationarrow_forwardQuestion 25 VQA stands for: O Village, Quality, Allegiance O Vintners Quality Alliance O Variation, Quality, Association O Vintners Quality Assurancearrow_forwardQUESTION 8 The U.S. Social Security Administration is a federal agency. The Iowa Department of Social Services is a parallel state agency. If these agen-cies' regulations conflict O a. the federal agency's regulations take precedence. O b. the state agency's regulations take precedence. h O c. the two agencies' regulations cancel each other. O d. the two agencies' regulations take equal precedence Note:- Do not provide handwritten solution. Maintain accuracy and quality in your answer. Take care of plagiarism. Answer completely. You will get up vote for sure.arrow_forward
- Question 6 Flu Shot Dosage A hospital in a developing nation is forced to manually put the flu shot vaccine into syringes. The recommended dosage for the flu shot is 0.5mL. The local health authorities define all syringes that have less than 0.45ml or more than 0.55mL as defective. In a sample of 100 syringes, the hospital’s quality control officer finds the average dosage to be 0.5mL. The standard deviation of the dosage is 0.02 mL and the distribution of the dosages resembles a normal distribution reasonably closely. What percentage of the manually filled syringes will be outside the specification limits provided by the local health authorities? (Please answer in decimal form.)arrow_forwardQuestion 53 Costco provides its Privacy Policy on its website. What examples of privacy practices for customer information should Costco include? Their commitment to privacy How long they hold on to personal information O When they collect, how they use and when they share customers' personal information What steps are taken to ensure customer information is secure All of the abovearrow_forwardQuestion 3 Knowing that the demand for wheat is inelastic, if all farmers voluntarily did not plant wheat on 10 percent of their land, then O a. consumers of wheat would buy more wheat. O b. wheat farmers would suffer a reduction in their total revenue. O c. wheat farmers would experience an increase in their total revenue. Od. the demand for wheat would decrease.arrow_forward
- QUESTION 3 Metropolitan General Hospital is a city-owned and operated public hospital. Its emergency room is the largest and most prominent in the city. Approximately 70% of emergency cases in the city come or are sent to Metro General's emergency room. As a result, the emergency room is often crowded and the staff is overworked, causing concern among hospital administrators and city officials about the quality of service and health care the emergency room is able to provide. One of the key quality attributes administrators focus on is patient waiting time that is, the time be- tween when a patient checks in and registers and when the patient first sees an appropriate medical staff member. Hospital administration wants to monitor patient waiting time using statistical process control charts. At different times of the day over a period of several days, patient waiting times were recorded at random with the following results: Sample 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 7 22 6 25 21 17 25 15 1 28 27 16…arrow_forwardQUESTION 8 A stock analyst wants to determine whether there is a difference in the mean rate of return for 5 types of stock. The analyst selected a sample of 132 and conducted an ANOVA test that shown as follows. Variation SS df F MS 7 Between 237 7 (Treatment) 7 7 ? Within (Error) Total 1027 The between (Treatment) mean square is equal to? (Round answer to three decimal places ex. 2.091)arrow_forwardQuestion Help Tract Tract Coorainates 101 2,000 5,000 10,500 (24,44) (25,24) (52.45) (52,18) (80,48) (70,20) (90,25) 102 103 104 7.200 105 10,000 21,000 106 107 12,000 a) The center-of-gravity coordinates for the location of the proposed outlet in Mobile, Alabama should be: x = 65.63 (round your response to two decimal places). y = 29.69 (round your response to two decimal places). %3D b) Census tracts 103 and 105 are each projected to grow by 30% in the next year The new center-of-gravity coordinates for the location of the proposed outlet in Mobile, Alabama should be: orrect: 0 (round your response to two decimal places). Enter vour answer in the answer box and then click Check Answerarrow_forward
- Practical Management ScienceOperations ManagementISBN:9781337406659Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.Publisher:Cengage,Operations ManagementOperations ManagementISBN:9781259667473Author:William J StevensonPublisher:McGraw-Hill EducationOperations and Supply Chain Management (Mcgraw-hi...Operations ManagementISBN:9781259666100Author:F. Robert Jacobs, Richard B ChasePublisher:McGraw-Hill Education
- Purchasing and Supply Chain ManagementOperations ManagementISBN:9781285869681Author:Robert M. Monczka, Robert B. Handfield, Larry C. Giunipero, James L. PattersonPublisher:Cengage LearningProduction and Operations Analysis, Seventh Editi...Operations ManagementISBN:9781478623069Author:Steven Nahmias, Tava Lennon OlsenPublisher:Waveland Press, Inc.