Operation Management

Sherri Baker

Operations Management

April 24, 2012

Sawhill Athletic Club (B)

1. What is the reason Sawhill is regularly running out of towels? The washer only holds twenty towels per wash and it takes sixty minutes to dry the towels. They only have one full staff member to run the washer and dryer. All together it takes one hour to wash sixty towels. Sawhill faces an hourly demand for towels of sixty. The washer requires twenty minutes to wash a batch of twenty towels and it can do three batches per hour, therefore its hourly output matches the demand of sixty towels per hour. The dryer also uses a batch size of twenty. However, it requires sixty minutes to dry a load. Therefore, its output rate is twenty towels per hour. Both the washing machine and dryer use a batch size of twenty. The folding rate is also sixty towels per hour. Even though two of the operations can meet the demand, the bottleneck operation limit to twenty towels per hour.

2. What is the cycle time of the current washing-drying folding process? What should the cycle time be in order to meet towel demand? The cycle time is determined by the longest time required to complete a batch. The washer and dryer use batches of twenty. The dryer requires an hour to complete this batch. Therefore the cycle time is one hour per batch of twenty. In order to meet demand, the cycle time or batch size of the bottleneck operation needs to be improved. With a batch size of twenty, the dryer would need to have a cycle time of twenty minutes.

3. Will purchasing an additional washer and dryer solve the problem? How will the cycle time change with an additional washer and dryer? Suggest a solution to the problem. No, purchasing an additional washer and dryer will not solve the problem. Two dryers operating in parallel raise the batch size to forty towels. They will still have a cycle time of one hour for a batch of forty towels. This rate of output is still below the needed sixty per hour....