Question: Children's Learning (10 points) The Children's Learning Company (CLC)'s R&D department is always looking for great ideas for new educational toys for children. On average,


Children's Learning (10 points) The Children's Learning Company (CLC)'s R\&D department is always looking for great ideas for new educational toys for children. On average, the R\&D department generates about 15 new toy ideas a week. To go from idea to approved product, the idea must go through 5 sequential activities: In initial screening, a staff member spends 2 hours considering the idea. In mock-up, the idea is sent to one of many suppliers to produce a physical mock-up of the toy. There is essentially unlimited capacity at this activity, but it takes 4 days to get the mockup built even though multiple mockups can be built simultaneously. In safety testing, each idea requires 2 days from a staff member to have the idea checked for safety. In focus groups, each idea requires 3 hours from a staff member to have the idea test marketed. Finally, the management team meets for 4 hours per idea to decide if the toy should be added to its line of products sold to customers. At the end of each activity, successful ideas enter the next activity. All other ideas are dropped. The following table summarizes the process: For example, there are 7staff members that work in the safety activity. In each activity, each idea is processed by only one staff member: for example, once one of the 7 staff members starts working on an idea in the safety activity, the idea completes that activity in 2 days (and either exits or moves to the focus group activity). Everyone works 8 hours per day, 5 days a week. b) Implied utilization at each activity is defined as demand divided by capacity (where we recall that the demand at each activity is defined as the activity's input flow rate if the capacity at each of the activities was infinite). Which activity has the highest implied utilization (as a \%)
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