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An assembly line has 5 stations with times of 1, 5, 7, 4, 10, respectively. What is the bottleneck time

1 Answer

7 votes

Answer:

10

Explanation:

You want the bottleneck time in an assembly line with station times of 1, 5, 7, 4, and 10.

Bottleneck

The rate-limiting station is the one where processing takes the longest time. In this assembly line, that is Station 5, with a time of 10.

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Additional comment

Ideally, kits would be released to production only at the rate that station 5 can process them. If station 5 is not first in the sequence of processes, there should be a control mechanism that rate-limits input to the first station.

In this assembly line, product released faster than 1 per 7 time units will pile up in front of station 3, and again in front of station 5.

Quality controls should be in place to make sure that station 5 only has good input, and always produces good output. As the rate-limit in the process, its time cannot be wasted on bad product.

User Aryan Firouzian
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