Problem Solving: Designing a Production Line

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Problem Solving: Designing a Production Line. (Solutions should be provided) Real Fruit Strips are made from a mixture of dried fruit, food coloring, preservatives, and glucose. The mixture is pressed out into a thin sheet, imprinted with various shapes, rolled, and packaged. Since this is a new product to be launched in the market, the production workers in each process are timed with the results of the time study and indicated a normal time as shown in Table 1 except Operation No. 40. However, a review of the Operation No. 40 was conducted and showed the five observations conducted by an OM analyst with elemental times noted.

The allowance for each process such as this is 15%. The precedence and results of time and motion study for each step in the assembly process are given below.

To meet the demand, Real Fruit needs to produce fruit strips every month for the coming year 2021 which has to be determined using the linear projection method as requested by management as the most desirable method in projecting the forecast for the year 2021. The historical information gathered as described in the production plan is in Table 2. The plant is running a one-shift operation at 7.5 effective hours. It is assumed that the monthly production for the year 2021 will be constant unless changes in the market are evident. (Decimal shall be rounded off to the next number if the number represents a unit of output or a resource.)

Accordingly, you are task to design an assembly line with the fewest number of workstations and resources that will achieve the product demand in the year 2021 without violating precedence constraints. Assume 25 average working days for the year 2021. Determine the following items below:

1. Draw the process flow diagram.
2. Given the demand, what is the "rhythm of production or the "Takt time" of the production line for Jan 2021?
3. Determine the normal time of Operation No, 40. Table 1
4. What is the standard time for each process? Operation 10, 20, 30 and 40? In Table 1.
5. What is the standard time of the entire product line if the allowance is 15%?
6. What is the design capacity of this process?
7. How many production workers are required to support the plan for 2021?
8. Design and diagram a production layout to support the plan, showing each workstations.

Label each production process accordingly and allocate item its resources to your design production.

1. What is the overall efficiency of the assembly line at minimum workstations?
2. What operations in the process is the bottleneck (has limited capacity)?

(a written report should be presented to the management of your recommendations.)