The Boston Cranberry Company operated a small facility where berries were unloaded from trucks, washed and packed, then delivered to local convenience stores for sale to consumers. The facility only operated during the cranberry-harvesting season, which lasted for 100 days each summer. Last year, the company experienced problems with the amount of overtime it had to pay truck drivers, who drove the cranberries from the local farms where they had been harvested to Boston Cranberry Company's facility for processing. In particular, by lunchtime, the cranberry holding bins (known as “dumper bins") had filled up, causing the incoming trucks to “back-up” and wait before they could unload their cranberries.

Mr. W. Boggs, the plant manager, was charged with fixing the problem. Several suggestions had been made, from adding more dumper bins to leasing more machines to speed up the plant’s processing rate. He asked you to advise him on the best approach.

On a typical day, trucks containing cranberries arrived at a rate of 6 trucks per hour, beginning at 8am, when the facility opened, and ending at 4pm, 8 hours later. The facility remained open until all of the berries had been washed and bagged. Each truck delivered a full truckload of berries. The trucks unloaded their berries into one of four dumper bins – each of which held two truckloads of cranberries. A conveyor belt carried the berries from the dumper bins into a single “washer” unit, where the berries were sprayed with a mixture of water and preservatives to ensure that they were clean. The washer had a maximum processing capacity of 5 truckloads/hour. After the cranberries left the washer, the conveyor belt dropped them into one of two “bagging” machines, where they were packed in plastic bags. Each of these machines had a maximum processing capacity of 2 truckloads/hour. The finished bags were manually loaded onto the company’s delivery trucks for delivery (you can ignore this part of the process).

1. 1) Draw the process flow for this operation.

2. 2) What is the bottleneck in this process (i.e., the limiting step)?

3. 3) How fast will inventory build up on a typical day (if at all)?

4. 4) Where does inventory build up in this process (if at all)?

5. 5) At what time will the trucks begin to wait (if at all)?

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1 Process Flow i Inbound Supplies In this case process starts when the trucks bring the cranberries ... View the full answer