Casey Belzer runs a small machine shop that fabricates parts for sprayers used in foam insulation equipment.

Question:

Casey Belzer runs a small machine shop that fabricates parts for sprayers used in foam insulation equipment. With the renewed interest in green building practices and high energy costs demand for his products have increased dramatically. The shop has three CNC machines that can serve a variety of purposes. As customer orders come in, a routing sheet is developed and the order is diagrammed as shown below. When demand was low, it didn€™t really matter how the jobs were scheduled. Now, Casey wants to finish each job as quickly as possible so he can move on to the next one. Help Casey develop a schedule that would finish a customer order for 200 units of part A as soon as possible. Assume one B, C, and D are needed for each A.
a. Find the bottleneck process.
b. According to the theory of constraints, which component (i.e., B, C, or D) should be schedule first on the bottleneck process?
c. Which component should be scheduled last?
d. Map out the optimum schedule on a Gantt chart and calculate the completion time. Assume that the process batch size is 200 and the transfer batch size isone.