“Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope”

Shantha, the owner of a small assembly shop, had just secured an order for the two
types of Sub-assemblies in the shop. The shop was supplying these sub-assemblies to
a large company. She announced this happy news to the supervisors of these assembly
lines and asked them to come up with a plan for meeting the new requirement.

The present production rate from Line-A, supervised by Mr. Sane, was 315 units/day.
Under the new contract 420 units/day needed to be supplied. The estimated
contribution per unit was Rs. 30. The line employed seven workers. The hourly
regular wage per worker was Rs.18, and the overtime wage was Rs.30 per hour.
Subassembly A required 16 different tasks. Technological relationship between the
activities and the time required to do an activity are given in the table below. The
technological relationship establishes the precedence between the activities. For
example, activity 4 cannot be started until activity 1 is finished and activity 7 until
activities 4 and 5 are finished.

Activity Activity Time Immediate

(Seconds) Predecessor
1 30 None
2 50 None
3 40 1
4 50 1
5 20 2
6 10 3
7 10 4,5
8 20 2
9 10 6
10 40 9
11 20 7
12 30 7
13 50 9
14 50 10
15 10 11
16 40 8,12

The present configuration of Line-A is given below.

Worker 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Activities 1,3 2,5 4,8 6,9,13 7,10,11 14,15 12,16

In the above set up, worker 1 completes activities 1 and 3 and the sub-assembly is
passed on to worker 2, who complete activities 2 and 5 and so on. Sane takes great
pride in the above design. He states that by uniform loading of workers he has been
successful in inculcating a cooperative attitude amongst his workers. Moreover, his
line maintains the flexibility of responding to slight increase in production without
any major reorganization.

1
Line-B is supervised by Uma and currently employed only 2 workers. The precedence
relationship between the activities and the activity times for sub-assembly B are
shown below:

Activity Activity Time Immediate

(Seconds) Predecessor
a 40 None
b 50 None
c 70 a
d 20 a
e 50 a
f 40 b,c
g 60 e
h 30 d,f,g

The present configuration of Line-B is given below.

Worker 1 2
Activities a,b,c,d e,f,g,h

In present organization, worker 1 completes the activities a, b, c and d and worker 2,

completes the remaining activities. The new requirement for sub-assembly B is 210
units /day.

The shop operates 8 hours/day. But, because of strenuous work, four rest periods of
15 minutes each are provided during the day. It is possible to schedule an overtime of
2 hours each on both the lines. However, previous experience with Line-B clearly
indicates that the overtime results in an additional rejection rate of 1% due to fatigue.
The cost of one unit rejected is estimated to be Rs.420. In Line A, there is no
appreciable increase in the rejection rate due to overtime.

Next morning Uma and Sane met Shantha. Sane stated that he would need 2 more
workers to meet the approximately 33% increase in production requirement. Uma also
wanted 2 more workers. Shantha responded that it was impossible for her to hire more
than 3 workers at such short notice as both the jobs required specialized training. In
fact, she preferred to hire as few workers as possible because the cost of training
workers was quite high. It would cost the shop about Rs.6000 per worker for training
if they had to be on the job by the time the delivery for the new orders began. She
asked them to investigate the possibility of scheduling overtime to meet the new
requirements. She was particularly unhappy with Uma as she was unable to
understand why she should double her requirement for workers for just 50% increase
in the production rate. She asked Uma and Sane to agree upon a plan in the next few
days.

2
The meeting between Uma and Sane was not too pleasant. After a long discussion,
Uma told Sane that she could mathematically prove that she needed to have 2 workers
to cope with the new requirements. And, therefore, Sane must agree to hire 1 worker
and work overtime. Sane argued back "I know you have just learnt some fancy
techniques in the MBA programme of IIMA. But, I am a practical manager. Can you
explain how I can raise productivity 33% by additionally recruiting less than 30% of
my present work force; you have to produce only 50% more and yet you want to hire
2 more workers; why do you need to double your work force? And, as for your
argument about the idle time my workers have at present, I bet my life you can't meet
the existing requirement with less than 7 workers. Idle time is demotivating. You
cannot let some worker be idle all along. I rotate them to enrich the job and also to
make sure that the idle time is equally shared. Your job has been simple. It does not
take great organizational skill to manage 2 workers. I think you are just afraid of
change. You just want to make sure that you have enough workers so you don't have
to work with a tight schedule."

Uma withdrew herself from further discussions and said: "Don't bother me, I can't
cope with such arguments. Even simple things are beyond your comprehension"!

Lead Questions:

1. Find out the current capacities of the both lines. Indentify the bottlenecks
2. What are the options available to Sane and Uma to meet new requirements?
3. What plan would you suggest to meet the new requirements of both sub-
assemblies A and B within the given constraints? Show all calculations with
cost data and cost implications to company.

* In case of hiring more workers to meet the new requirement. Please note that you
have only 3 workers to hire for both the lines A & B.