An automated car wash serves customers with the following serial process: pretreat, wash, rinse, wax, hand dry.
Question:
An automated car wash serves customers with the following serial process: pretreat, wash, rinse, wax, hand dry. Each of these steps is performed by a dedicated machine except for the hand-dry step, which is performed manually on each car by one of three workers. The steps of the process have the following processing times:
- Pretreat: 1 minute per car
- Wash: 5 minutes per car
- Rinse: 2 minutes per car
- Wax: 3 minutes per car
- Hand dry: 8 minutes per car
a. Which resource is the bottleneck of this process?
b. If the car wash has a demand of 15 cars per hour, what is the flow rate of the process?
c. If the car wash has a demand of 15 cars per hour, what is the utilization of the machine that performs the wax process?
d. If the car wash has a demand of 10 cars per hour, what is the utilization of hand dry?
e. If the car wash has a demand of 10 cars per hour, what is the cycle time of the process (minutes)?
f. Starting from an empty system (and assuming the stations can work independently), how long would it take (minutes) to wash 5 cars?
Step by Step Answer:
Operations Management
ISBN: 9781260547610
2nd International Edition
Authors: Gerard Cachon, Christian Terwiesch