EXERCISES

CHAPTER 2,3
Exercise 10 (set 1)
Wishbone Farms grows turkeys to sell to a meat-processing company throughout
the year. However, its peak season is obviously during the fourth quarter of the
year, from October to December. Wishbone Farms has experienced the
demand for turkeys for the past three years shown in the following table.
What will the forecasts for each quarter in 2022 be, if the forecast for 2022 is
58,170 turkeys?

Demand (1000s) per Quarter

Year 1 2 3 4
2019 12.6 8.6 6.3 17.5
2020 14.1 10.3 7.5 18.2
2021 15.3 10.6 8.1 19.6
Exercise 1
Real Fruit Snack Strips are made from a mixture of dried fruit, food
coloring, preservatives, and glucose. The mixture is pressed out into a
thin sheet, imprinted with various shapes, rolled, and packaged. The
precedence and time requirements for each step in the assembly
process are given below. To meet demand, Real Fruit needs to produce
6000 fruit strips every 40-hour week. Design an assembly line with the
fewest number of workstations that will achieve the production quota
without violating precedence constraints.
Exercise 2
The tasks shown in the following precedence diagram are to be assigned to
workstations with the intent of minimizing idle time. Management has designed an
output rate of 275 units per day. Assume 440 minutes are available per day.
a. Determine the appropriate cycle time.
b. What is the minimum number of stations possible?
c. Assign tasks using the “positional weight” rule: Assign tasks with highest following
times (including a task’s own time) first. Break ties using greatest number of following
tasks.
d. Compute efficiency.
Exercise 3
An assembly line with 17 tasks is to be balanced. The longest task is 2.4
minutes, and the total time for all tasks is 18 minutes. The line will
operate for 450 minutes per day.
a. What are the minimum and maximum cycle times?
b. What range of output is theoretically possible for the line?
c. What is the minimum number of workstations needed if the
maximum output rate is to be sought?
d. What cycle time will provide an output rate of 125 units per day?
e. What output potential will result if the cycle time is (1) 9 minutes? (2)
15 minutes?
Exercise 4
Boeing wants to develop a precedence diagram for an
electrostatic wing component that requires a total assembly
time of 65 minutes. Boeing determines that there are 480
productive minutes of work available per day. Furthermore,
the production schedule requires that 40 units of the wing
component be completed as output from the assembly line
each day. It now wants to group the tasks into workstations.
a) Draw the precedence diagram
b) Determine the appropriate cycle time.
c) What is the minimum number of stations possible?
d) Calculate the efficiency of the new layout.
Exercise 5
Exercise 6
A small firm produces and sells automotive items in a five-state
area. The firm expects to consolidate assembly of its battery
chargers line at a single location. Currently, operations are in
three widely scattered locations. The leading candidate for
location will have a monthly fixed cost of $42,000 and variable
costs of $3 per charger. Chargers sell for $7 each. Prepare a
table that shows total profits, fixed costs, variable costs, and
revenues for monthly volumes of 10,000, 12,000, and 15,000
units.
a) What is the break-even point?
b) Determine profit when volume equals 22,000 units.