The Long Beach Freight Forwarder Inc. (LBFF) provides container unloading and freight forwarding services to its customers. Ships arrive at the Port of Long Beach carrying containers, which are unloaded onto a fleet of trucks. LBFF has an adequate fleet of trucks capable of handling containers that are unloaded from the ships. The trucks transport the containers to the Import Distribution Center(IDC). At the IDC, the containers get sorted by destination (many of the containers are mixed so LBFF has a process to move contents among containers so that each containers contents are headed to the same geographic location). Once sorted, another fleet of trucks transports the containers from the IDC to regional warehouses in those destination areas. From here on, we will restrict ourselves to the receiving process at the IDC only.

During the day (6am-6pm), ships arrive at a high rate providing an approximately continuous arrival flow of containers with an average rate of 2500 containers/hour. During the night (6pm-6am), however, ship berths are slower, resulting in an average arrival rate of 500 containers/hour. LBFF runs two 12-hour shifts at its IDC: the day shift starts at regular business opening time of 8am and leaves by 8pm [crews are staggered in four-day weeks]. The day shift has the largest amount of employees and can process up to 2000 containers/hour. The night shift, on the other hand, is smaller and can process up to 1000 containers/hour from 8pm-8am. It is known that the trucks typically had to wait to unload at the IDC during a portion of the day shift. This happens when the total storage area (designed to store up to 5000 containers) of the unloading zone at the IDC is full. Truck drivers were paid $10/hour, benefits included.

Two Mason grads, hired to improve the process, fondly recalled their operations & supply chain class and proposed two possible improvements:

i. Increase the unloading storage area so that it can store an additional 1500 containers.

ii. Run 3 shifts: 2 new days shifts (8am-4pm and 4pm-10pm) processing 2000 containers/hour and 1 new night shift (10pm-8am) processing 1000 containers/hour.

4.1. On the grid (the x-axis starts at 6 am), draw the parcel inventory of LBFFs receiving process under current operating procedures AND under the two proposals. So, on an average day, I am asking you to chart the inventory build up and build down throughout the day. Inventory starts out at zero at 6 am (2 points extra credit if you can show why). By 7 am, 2500 containers came in but only 1000 were processed (the night shift is still on) so the inventory buildup is 1500 containers at 7 am and so on

Make sure you identify on your chart:

(a) All the three scenarios: current operations and the two proposed solutions.

(b) The rate (i.e., containers/hr) of buildup or build down of container inventory. (Just note the slope of the line whenever it changes)

Any computations that are used to construct the chart please do in the space below:

Container Inventory (x100) --