[The following information applies to questions 14-16.]
Furniture Face Lift refinishes old wood furniture. Their process for refinishing chairs has 8 workers and 4 stations. Each chair starts at the Stripping station, then goes to Priming, then to Painting and finally to Inspection. Where there are multiple workers within a station, each worker works independently on his/her own chair. Assume inventory buffers are allowed between each station.
Station Staffiing Processing time (hours per chair per worker)
Stripping 3 workers 2.5
Priming 2 workers 1.5
Painting 2 workers 1.75
Inspection 1 worker 17/10
**Multiple workers within the same station conduct in-parallel production activities. Note the processing time is for per unit per worker.
a. What is the maximum number of chairs per hour that can be produced? Assume they start the day with inventory at each station to work on (that is assuming the process is operated continually).
b. Suppose at the start of the day there is no inventory of chairs in the shop. That is, there are no chairs within any of the stations or between them in any buffer. A truck loaded with 15 chairs arrives. How many hours will it take them to complete these 15 chairs?
c. Suppose now that each worker is trained to do all tasks and each worker works on a chair from start to finish, i.e., each worker does Stripping, Priming, Painting and Inspection. What is the maximum capacity of the process in chairs per hour?
Note: for all HW assignments, please show your process of getting the results. Only providing the final answers is NOT acceptable and will get 0%. If necessary, please use a separate sheet of paper to show your work