Exercise $4\mathrm{.}13$

A business process experiences a market demand of $35$ jobs per day. A working day consists of $490$ minutes, and the process activity times do not exhibit significant amounts of variation. A process management team would like to apply the line$-$balancing technique to assign activities to workstations. The activity times and the immediate predecessors to each activity are given in Table $4\mathrm{.}19.$

a$.$ Use the longest activity time rule as the primary rule to assign activities to stations.

b$.$ Compute the efficiency of the line to the theoretical maximum efficiency. Is it possible to improve the line efficiency?

TABLE $4\mathrm{.}19$

Data for Exercise $4\mathrm{.}13$

$\backslash$table$[[$Activity$,$Time $($min$),$Immediate Predecessor$],[$A$,3,-],[$B$,6,-],[$C$,7,$A$],[$D$,5,$A$,$ B$],[$E$,2,B$