Based on the process described and the information provided below, please respond to questions 1 to 8.

Assume an online shopping platform such as Amazon. There is an Order fulfillment center, which performs as follows upon receiving any online order from the customers:

There are 2 staff who can equally take care of the same tasks in the fulfillment center. Once an order is received, one staff issues an electronic order fulfillment request to the warehouse for fulfillment (by providing the items and specifications asked by the customer). This staff then issues a shipping label print request to be prepared by the only staff at the print shop. The shipping label is sent back to the order fulfillment center by the print shop staff once ready. In parallel, in the warehouse, one of the 2 warehouse staff takes care of the inventory check and order fulfilling tasks, which means s/he prepares the order and fills the cart for that order, and adds a tag to ensure the cart will be shipped to the right customer. Once ready, the cart is then sent back to the fulfillment center, at which point one of the 2 fulfillment center staff takes care of the following three tasks: 1) Looks for the right shipping label for that particular order, 2) Looks the right box or envelop that best matches the items for packaging, 3) Takes care of the packaging and sticks the shipping label to it, and finally in the last step s/he drops the parcel in a container which later is taken care of and is shipped for distribution to the customer. This process is shown in the following process flowc

1. What is the flow unit in this process? (One or two words only- no long answers needed) (5 points)

2. Identify the critical path in this process. Based on what criteria did you conclude on that path being the critical path? (5 points)

3. Based on the average durations provided for each step in the picture above, what is the flow time of this process (which means: how long it takes from start to the end point for each order in average)? (5 points)

4 In average 6 orders arrive each hour at this center. Considering the process overall flow time which you calculated in question 2, what is the average number of orders awaiting processing at this fulfillment center? (5 points)

5. The unit load for each resource pool is provided in the table below in terms of minutes per order. Use the table below and fill in the blank cells, which means to calculate the hourly effective capacity of the 3 resource pools in this process (dont forget to convert the units to match the others in your formula) (9 points)

Resource Pool	Unit Load (minutes per order)	Number of Units in the Resource Pool	Effective Capacity of a Resource Pool (orders per hour)
Warehouse	24	2
Fulfillment Center	20	2
Print Shop	15	1

Hint: Unit load is the required time to handle one flow unit by one resource unit). The unit load refers to the total time spent by that resource on each flow unit, and the value in the table below is the summation of durations for all the steps each resource pool takes care of (For example, you can assume that the Warehouse staff have to spend a total of 24 minutes per order.

6. Based on the values you calculated above, what is the effective capacity of this process (how many orders per hour can this center fulfill in average)? (5 points)

7. Considering the inflow and outflow rates, is there an external bottleneck or an internal one to this process? (5 points)

8. Hoping to serve more customers within the same amount of time (which means increasing the hourly effective capacity), this center is considering the option of adding 1 more staff in the warehouse. Will this change make a positive impact on the throughput? If yes, what will be the new overall capacity of the process? If not, why? (6 points)