A toy manufacturer receives crafted toys from local carpenters and performs the final operations before

stocking them for sale. The process consists of five steps. The first step is cleaning and placing a toy in
a tray. After this, the tray moves to the next station, where the toys are pre-treated. This is to increase
the toys’ life, prevent them from pest attacks in the future, and also to improve the effectiveness of the
painting operation. The next step is to send it to the spray-painting chamber, where it is painted as per
the specifications and it is dried. At present, there is one spray-painting machine. After painting, some
of the toys are sent for inspection. Finally, all the toys are packed. The steps in the process, along with
the relevant details, are as follows:

Step 1 Prepare
Step 2 Pre-treatment
Step 3 Painting
Step 4 Inspection
Step 5 Packaging

Step 1 has 1 resource.

Step 2 has 3 resources parallelly. A toy needs to visit only one of the resources.
Step 3 has 1 resource.
Step 4 has 1 resource. Only 20% of the toys go through Step 4.
Step 5 has 2 resources. All the toys go through Step 5. 20% of the toys that go through Step 4 will be
packed by Resource 1. 80% of the toys that don’t go through Step 4 will be packed by Resource 2.
Answer the following questions:
a. Fill the blank spaces in the given diagram (Time or Capacity).
b. Compute the capacity of total resources at all the steps (Imagine you have a pattern where
there's one toy that needs step 4 and then the next four toys that don't need step 4. This sequence
keeps repeating.)
c. Identify the bottleneck for this process.
d. What is the cycle time for this process?
e. What is the production rate?
Answer:
a.

b.
Step Calculation Capacity
Step 1 12 toys/hr
Step 2 6 + 4 + 5 = 15 toys/hr 15 toys/hr
Step 3 16 toys/hr
Step 4 20%(30 min) + 80%(0 min) = 6 min 10 toys/hr
Capacity = 60/6 = 10/hr
(or)
The first toy is inspected. It will take 30 mins to inspect it. The next
four toys are not inspected. So, at the end of 30 mins, you’ll have 5
toys ready for step 5. After the next 30 mins, you’ll have another 5
toys ready for step 5. So, the capacity is 10 toys/hr.
Step 5 20%(10 min) + 80%(4 min) = 5.2 min 11.54 toys/hr
Capacity = 60/5.2 = 11.54 toys/hr

c. Step 4 (Inspecting)
d. 6 min
Bottleneck step’s processing time
e. 10 toys/hr