Question: An operations manager is given a task to analyze the process flow of a bakery. The bakery involves two steps to prepare the bread.

The first is preparing the dough and baking the loaves, here referred to as bread making.

The second is packaging the loaves.

Due to the size of the mixers in the bakery, bread is made in batches of $100$ loaves. Bread making completes a batch of $100$ loaves every hour, which is the cycle time for the activity. Packaging needs only $0\mathrm{.}75$ hour to place the $100$ loaves in bags. We can assume that packaging starts up an hour after bread making, otherwise it would be idle for a full hour before getting any work at the start of the day.

Identify the bottleneck resource?

Where should you invest to expand the capacity of the bakery?

Calculate the flow time of the process and work in process inventory?

$4.$ Now suppose, there are $2$ units of bread making and only one unit of packaging. Answer $1,2$ and $3$ again. Note: breadmaking is operated for $2$ shifts and packaging for $3$ shifts.