A local manufacturing plant has three work stations (as shown in the following figure) with two machines operating in parallel in workstation 1. In other words, before proceeding to station 2, the product can be processed in either one of the two machines in workstation 1:

1. Which workstation among the three is the bottleneck workstation?

2. If the company operates 8 hours per day, 7 days per week, what is the weekly capacity of this work cell?

3. If you could increase the capacity of any one of three work stations, which one would you focus on? By how much would you increase the capacity of this work station?

4. What would be the effective capacity of the total system after these improvements are made?

Station A Machine-1 16 min/unit Station B Station C 10 min/unit 8 min/unit Station A Machine-2 16 min/unit