Chapter 52: Melissa's Photo Studio Offers Both Individual An

Chapter 52 Melissas Photo Studio Offers Both Individual And Group Po

Chapter 52 Melissas Photo Studio offers both individual and group portrait options. The process flow diagram in Figure 5.10 shows that all customers must first register and then pay at one of two cashiers. Then, depending on whether they want a single or group portrait, they go to different rooms. Finally, everyone picks up their own finished portrait. a. How long does it take to complete the entire process for a group portrait? b. What single activity is the bottleneck for the entire process, assuming the process receives equal amounts of both groups and individuals? c. What is the capacity of the bottleneck for both groups and individuals? CHAPTER . The Farm-4-Less tractor company produces a grain combine (GC) in addition to both a large (LT) and small size tractor (SM). Its production manager desires to produce to customer demand using a mixed-model production line. The current sequence of production, which is repeated 30 times during a shift, is SM-GC-SM-LT-SM-GC-LT-SM. A new machine is produced every 2 minutes. The plant operates two 8-hour shifts. There is no downtime because the 4 hours between each shift are dedicated to maintenance and restocking raw material. Based on this information, answer the following questions. a. How long does it take the production cycle to be completed? b. How many of each type of machine does Farm-4-Less produce in a shift? CASE: Copper Kettle Catering Copper Kettle Catering (CKC) is a full-service catering company that provides services ranging from box lunches for picnics or luncheon meetings to large wedding, dinner, or office parties. Established as a lunch delivery service for offices in 1972 by Wayne and Janet Williams, CKC has grown to be one of the largest catering businesses in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Williams’s divide customer demand into two categories: deliver only and deliver and serve. The deliver-only side of the business delivers boxed meals consisting of a sandwich, salad, dessert, and fruit. The menu for this service is limited to six sandwich selections, three salads or potato chips, and a brownie or fruit bar. Grapes and an orange slice are included with every meal, and iced tea can be ordered to accompany the meals. The overall level of demand for this service throughout the year is fairly constant, although the mix of menu items delivered varies. The planning horizon for this segment of the business is short: Customers usually call no more than a day ahead of time. CKC requires customers to call deliver-only orders in by 10:00 a.m. to guarantee delivery the same day. The deliver-and-serve side of the business focuses on catering large parties, dinners, and weddings. The extensive range of menu items includes a full selection of hors d’oeuvres, entrées, beverages, and special-request items. The demand for these services is much more seasonal, with heavier demands occurring in the late spring–early summer for weddings and the late fall–early winter for holiday parties. However, this segment also has a longer planning horizon. Customers book dates and choose menu items weeks or months ahead of time. CKC’s food preparation facilities support both operations. The physical facilities layout resembles that of a job process. Five major work areas consist of a stove–oven area for hot food preparation, a cold area for salad preparation, an hors d’oeuvre preparation area, a sandwich preparation area, and an assembly area where deliver-only orders are boxed and deliver-and-serve orders are assembled and trayed. Three walk-in coolers store foods requiring refrigeration, and a large pantry houses nonperishable goods. Space limitations and the risk of spoilage limit the amount of raw materials and prepared food items that can be carried in inventory at any one time. CKC purchases desserts from outside vendors. Some deliver the desserts to CKC; others require CKC to send someone to pick up desserts at their facilities. The scheduling of orders is a two-stage process. Each Monday, the Williamses develop the schedule of deliver-and-serve orders to be processed each day. CKC typically has multiple deliver-and-serve orders to fill each day of the week. This level of demand allows a certain efficiency in the preparation of multiple orders. The deliver-only orders are scheduled day to day, owing to the short-order lead times. CKC sometimes runs out of ingredients for deliver-only menu items because of the limited inventory space. Wayne and Janet Williams have 10 full-time employees: two cooks and eight food preparation workers, who also work as servers for the deliver-and-serve orders. In periods of high demand, the Williamses hire additional part-time servers. The position of cook is specialized and requires a high degree of training and skill. The rest of the employees are flexible and move between tasks as needed. The business environment for catering is competitive. The competitive priorities are high-quality food, delivery reliability, flexibility, and cost—in that order. “The quality of the food and its preparation is paramount,†states Wayne Williams. “Caterers with poor-quality food will not stay in business long.†Quality is measured by both freshness and taste. Delivery reliability encompasses both on-time delivery and the time required to respond to customer orders (in effect, the order lead time). Flexibility focuses on both the range of catering requests that a company can satisfy and menu variety. Recently, CKC began to notice that customers are demanding more menu flexibility and faster response times. Small specialty caterers who entered the market are targeting specific well-defined market segments. One example is a small caterer called Lunches-R-Us, which located a facility in the middle of a large office complex to serve the lunch trade and competes with CKC on cost. Wayne and Janet Williams are impressed by the lean systems concept, especially the ideas related to increasing flexibility, reducing lead times, and lowering costs. They sound like what CKC needs to remain competitive. However, the Williamses wonder whether lean concepts and practices are transferable to a service business. QUESTIONS 1. Are the operations of Copper Kettle Catering conducive to the application of lean concepts and practices? Explain. 2. What, if any, are the major barriers to implementing a lean system at Copper Kettle Catering? 3. What would you recommend that Wayne and Janet Williams do to take advantage of lean concepts in operating CKC? VIDEO CASE: Constraint Management at Southwest Airlines What if you could take a commercial airline flight anytime and anywhere you wanted to go? Just show up at the airport without the need to consider time schedules or layovers. Aside from the potentially cost-prohibitive nature of such travel, there are also constraints in the airline system that preclude this kind of operation. From the lobby check-in process through to boarding at the gate and processing plane turnaround, the process of operating the airline is filled with constraints that must be managed in order for them to be successful and profitable. Flight schedules are tightly orchestrated and controlled, departure and arrival gates at airports are limited, and individual aircraft have seating capacities in each section of the plane, to name a few. Southwest Airlines is one company that has figured out how to manage its constraints and generate positive customer experiences in the process. No other airline can claim the same level of profitability and customer satisfaction Southwest regularly achieves. What is its secret? Talk to any loyal Southwest customer and you will hear rave reviews about its low fares, great customer service, and lack of assigned seating that gives customers a chance to choose who they sit next to onboard. From an operations perspective, it is much more than what the customer sees. Behind the scenes, operations managers carefully manage and execute—3,400 times a day in over 60 cities in the United States—a process designed to manage all potential bottleneck areas. Southwest’s famous rapid gate-turnaround of 25 minutes or less demonstrates how attention to the activities that ground operations must complete to clean, fuel, and prepare a plane for flight can become bottlenecks if not properly scheduled. In the terminal at the gate, passenger boarding also can be a bottleneck if the boarding process itself is not carefully managed. Since the individual mix of passengers presents a different set of issues with each flight that often are not evident until the passengers actually arrive at the gate, operations managers must be ready for any and all situations to avoid a boarding bottleneck while also ensuring a pleasant and stress-free gate experience for all passengers. In 2007, as part of the company’s continuous improvement activities, Southwest focused its attention on the passenger boarding process to determine whether there was a better way to board. Its existing process consisted of three groups, A, B, C, with no assigned seating. Depending on passenger check-in and arrival time, passengers were given a spot in a group. Those first to check-in received choice places in the A group. The last to check in ended up in the C group and usually had a choice of only middle seats in the back of the plane upon boarding. As passengers arrived at the gate, they queued up in their respective boarding group areas to await the boarding call. Seven different alternate boarding scenarios were designed and tested. They included — New family pre-boarding behind the “A” group of first-to-board passengers — Family pre-boarding before anyone else, but seating choices limited on-board to behind the wing — Six boarding groups (within A-B-C groups) instead of the original three A-B-C groups — Assigned boarding gate line positions based on both boarding group and gate arrival time — Single boarding chute at the gate, but up to nine groups all in one queue — Boarding with a countdown clock to give customers an incentive to get in line and board quickly; incentives given out if everyone was on time — Educational boarding video to make the boarding process fun, inform passengers how to board efficiently, and provide the company another way to promote its brand. QUESTIONS 1. Analyze Southwest’s passenger boarding process using the TOC. 2. Which boarding scenario among the different ones proposed would you recommend for implementation? Why? 3. How should Southwest evaluate the gate boarding and plane turnaround process? 4. How will Southwest know that the bottleneck had indeed been eliminated after the change in the boarding process?