Machado Foods Plc is a Brazil based corporation. It processes and markets beef, pork, poultry, canned vegetables and frozen vegetables. Machado has a total of five food processing facilities, out of which two are specially dedicated to beef processing. Machado markets its beef, pork and poultry to a number of restaurant chains, supermarkets and small retail grocers. Machado continuously tries to increase the shelf life of its products. It invests substantial amounts of money in food technology R&D to this aim. To ensure a steady supply of raw materials for its meat packaging plants, Machado plans to acquire some local poultry farms and pig farms. In the meat processing industry, a lot of money is wasted because of the perishability of finished products. Until last year, Machado had outsourced the transportation of its finished products to local road carriers and had signed annual contracts with these local businesses. Now, Machado feels that it can reduce the spoilage cost if instead of outsourcing this activity, it manages the transportation internally. It can schedule the deliveries in a way that ensures minimum spoilage during transportation. Machado’s management is of the opinion that taking over the operations of an existing local road carrier would be a better option rather than setting up a new transportation division from scratch. Recently, the company has gathered data about the costs and profitability of other food processing companies whose operations are on the same scale as Machado’s. Machado’s costs seem to exceed the average costs of comparable businesses by almost 15 per cent. To weed out the inefficiencies in the system, the management has decided to keep a close eye on the time spent on value-added activities and non-value-added activities. The average times taken on these activities in the most recent quarter is given below:

Required
1. Calculate Machado’s throughput time.
2. Calculate Machado’s manufacturing cycle efficiency (MCE).
3. Calculate the percentage of production time spent on non-value-added activities.
4. Calculate Machado’s delivery cycle time.
5. Outline your analysis of Machado’s throughput time.
6. Identify what Machado’s acquisition of the local poultry farms and pig farms would be an example of.
7. Identify what Machado’s acquisition of a local road carrier would be an example of.
8. Analyse what factors would be highly indesirable for Machado to see a decrease in.

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Item Wait time Inspection time Process time Move time Queue time Number of days 5.0 0.2 1.0 0.3 1.5