Littlefield Simulation

I. Team Dynamics

Responsibility for monitoring the progress of our team was taken up by each member of the team. Each member was assigned two days to monitor the progress. On each team member’s day they would be responsible for monitoring all stations in the Little Field simulation. It was up to that team member to locate our weaknesses within the simulation and to bring it up to the entire group.

Once the group was notified of a change that needed to be made, we would all decide together through a group text. After we all decided that the change was a good idea, we would let the team member who was in charge for the day know and he made the appropriate changes to the station. This proved to be our success in running the simulation; all team members knew what was going on when changes needed to be made. We all came together to figure out the best course of action and then we executed.

II. Operational Decision and Analysis

1. Step 1 is the bottleneck because it has the largest average queue size compare to step 2, 3 or 4. Even though we purchased 5 machines for Step 1, the utilization rate were around 80% or 90% when demand was high. Although Step 2 and 4 do their jobs in the station, they only take 2.1 hours which is still low compare to 5.3 hours in Step 1.

2. In order to provide a throughput of 12 orders per day, 3 machines are needed because 3 machines/5.3 hours = .57 orders per hour.

3. The formula is y = 0.0839x + 1.0008. Therefore the expected daily demand on day 152 will be 13.75.

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6. The only machines that our group sold were at station 2. We started out with 3 machines and decided to sell 1 on day 211 and another on day 215, leaving us with 1 machine at station 2. After consulting the utilization of station 2 we realized that the utilization was very low. Selling 1 machine slightly increased the utilization but we were not satisfied. After selling another machine we finally reached maximum utilization on day 217. In...