Based on the process described and the information provided below,

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.

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)