Consider the assembly line below. The three fabrication operations run in parallel, such that each batch of 20 units only needs to go through one of the three fabrication operations. After that, each batch needs to go through both assembly operations, which occur simultaneously (specifically, 10 components are made for each unit in the fabrication stage-some components are then assembled in the Assembly 1 area while others are assembled in the Assembly 2 area). The units are packaged and made ready for shipment in the final stage. What is the bottleneck time per batch of this operation?
A) 24 min.
B) 8 min.
C) 88 min.
D) 34 min.
E) 3 min.

Question

Consider the assembly line below. The three fabrication operations run in parallel, such that each batch of 20 units only needs to go through one of the three fabrication operations. After that, each batch needs to go through both assembly operations, which occur simultaneously (specifically, 10 components are made for each unit in the fabrication stage-some components are then assembled in the Assembly 1 area while others are assembled in the Assembly 2 area). The units are packaged and made ready for shipment in the final stage.  What is the bottleneck time per batch of this operation?
A) 24 min. 
B) 8 min. 
C) 88 min. 
D) 34 min. 
E) 3 min.

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

In the fabrication stage, only one operation needs to be completed for each batch of 20 units, meaning that it will take 20 minutes (1 minute per unit) to complete the fabrication stage for that batch. In the assembly stage, both Assembly 1 and Assembly 2 run simultaneously, but each unit only requires 10 components to be assembled. Therefore, it will still take 20 minutes (2 minutes per component assembled) to complete the assembly stage for each batch. Finally, the packaging stage takes 4 minutes per batch. Therefore, the total time per batch is 20 + 20 + 4 = 44 minutes. Thus the bottleneck time per batch is the time it takes to fabricate a batch, which is 20 minutes.

Consider the Assembly Line Below