Process analysis / process configuration and metrics – process | Masters in Management | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

QUESTION 1: 

The process for handling insurance claims at a branch of the Green Insurance Company has an average flow rate of 2 claims per minute. Branch manager Shauna Green has calculated, based on her observations of the process, that there are 45 claims on average (including at and between different steps) in the claims handling process.

Based on this information, please calculate and report the average time spent by a claim in this process from start to end, making sure to include the units (minutes or hours) in order to get full credit for your answer.

Remember to show your work including any formula you use.

Round your final answer to three spaces (if needed) after the decimal.

Bold your final answer.

QUESTION 2: 

Huashan Maternity Hospital serves an average of 105 mothers per week for their deliveries of babies.

The hospital operates 7 days a week.

Mothers stay an average of 3 days in the single rooms at the hospital.

Director of Huashan, Dr. Honggeng Zhou, wants to estimate the number of rooms needed, and has requested your help.

To help Dr. Zhou with an estimate of the number of rooms, please calculate and report, based on the information provided, the average number of mothers that are in Huashan Maternity Hospital at a time.

Remember to show your work including any formula you use.

Round your final answer (if needed) to the nearest whole number (of mothers or rooms).

Bold your final answer.

QUESTION 3:

The information in this bolded paragraph applies to this question and the four questions that follow (so, questions 3-7).

A process at Artemis Industries for making award trophies for Gies learners consists of two tasks in sequence:

1. Molding, requiring 5 minutes for a trophy (also referred to as a unit)
2. Polishing, requiring 6 minutes for a trophy

Based on the information provided, please calculate and report what is the individual capacity (making sure to indicate for your final response: units per minute, or units per hour) of Task 1: Molding. That is, how many units can the Molding task process per minute or per hour?

Remember to show your work including any formula you use.

Round your final answer (if needed) to three places after the decimal.

Bold your final answer.

QUESTION 4:

Based on the information provided, please calculate and report what is the individual capacity (making sure to indicate for your final response: units per minute, or units per hour) of Task 2: Polishing. That is, how many units can the Polishing task process per minute or per hour?

QUESTION 5:

Which of the tasks in the two-task trophy making process is the bottleneck task?

Please explain, in a sentence, how you identified the bottleneck task.

QUESTION 6:

If a second workstation, identical to the first one in terms of the time taken per unit, is added to the Polishing task, please re-calculate and report what will be the new capacity for this task (making sure to indicate for your final response: units per minute, or units per hour)?

That is, how many units will the Polishing task with two identical workstations now be able to process per minute or per hour?

QUESTION 7:

For this question, ignore all the quantitative information in the trophy making scenario described earlier and the previous four questions but keep the context of the trophy making process.

Treat the quantitative information provided below as fresh information.

You are given the observed flow rate of the trophy making process to be 12 trophies per hour. You are also given the throughput time for a trophy to be completed through its two-task process to be 11 minutes.

Please calculate and report, based on the information provided, the average number of units that are in the process at a time.

QUESTION 8:

The information in this bolded paragraph applies to this and the following question (so, 8-9).

The owner of the Nordsee restaurant chain that has several locations in Bremen, Germany wants to assess the freshness of the meat used in their burgers and has requested your expertise for the task. Average inventory of raw meat in their centralized production facility is 1,000 pounds and the restaurant chain sells, on average, burgers totaling 500 pounds of meat every day.

Please calculate and report the freshness of the meat in terms of how many days on average the burger meat spends in the process?

QUESTION 9:

If the Nordsee restaurant chain were to reduce the amount of average inventory that they maintain in their centralized production facility from the current amount of 1,000 pounds to 500 pounds, and everything else stays the same…

…what impact would it have on the freshness of the meat in terms of how many days on average the meat spends in the process?

QUESTION 10:

At Dr. LaShawn Daniels’ clinic, each patient spends 6 minutes on average to get her or his vital signs checked.

There are 8 room-nurse pairs (nurse with own room) dedicated to this task.

Patients that go through the task = 392 per day.

Regular working time after reducing time for breaks = 7 hours per day.

What is the overall capacity utilization for the Vital Signs Check task, in percentage?