Hypothetical story You are working for a licensed processor that makes cannabis products for the medical market.
Question:
Hypothetical story
You are working for a licensed processor that makes cannabis products for the medical market.
Your company buys dried cannabis plants from a licensed grower and gelatin powder from a
food processor. It uses those raw materials to produce gelatin capsules ("gel caps") filled with
cannabis oil for sale online to authorized medical patients.
For its most popular product, the design specification states that the oil in each capsule should
contain 20.00 mg of CDB, but any amount between 18.50 and 21.50 mg is medically acceptable.
Capsules with CBD levels outside of those limits are discarded at a cost of $0.25 each.
Your company makes this product at two production sites. Each site operates for 35 hours per
week. One site serves customers from eastern Canada, where the demand averages 590,000
capsules per week. The other site serves customers in western Canada, where the demand
averages 415,000 capsules per week. Each site can produce up to 20,000 capsules per hour.
Your supervisor is concerned about the growing number of customer complaints about this
product. She is also looking for ways to boost productivity. Consequently, you have been
assigned to help the workers improve the gel cap production process.
Question: Story You are beginning your improvement project by quantifying the baseline performance of the two processes. Questions 1. Takt time. (Calculate these in seconds, relative to the production work week.) a) What is the takt time per capsule for the east site? b) What is the takt time per capsule for the west site? 2. Utilization. a) What is the utilization of the east site? b) What is the utilization of the west site? c) Which process is busier? 3. Yield. (Use the ratio formula in the slides, not the exponential formula 2.7 in the textbook.) a) What is the yield of the east site? b) What is the yield of the west site? c) Which process is better? 4. Loss function. a) What is the Taguchi quadratic loss function for this product? b) What would be the loss associated with a capsule containing 19.25 mg of CBD? c) What is the expected loss per capsule for the east site? d) What is the expected loss per capsule for the west site? e) Which process is better? 5. Briefly apply the SIPOC model to this situation. What are the main supplier(s), input(s), process, output(s), and customer(s)? Your answer should consist of about 5 sentences or bullet points.