Question

Consider the following production process. The process consists of 36 steps and operates at a cycle time of 0.58 min/unit. Their most error prone operation is step 6. If each worker checks the work of the previous steps and there are on average roughly 232 units of inventory between step 6 and the end of the process, equally distributed across the remainder of the process, what is the average information turnaround time for a defect made at step 6 (in minutes)? (report your answer to 2 decimal places)

Answer 1

To calculate the average information turnaround time for a defect made at step 6, we find the time for a defect to traverse one step and multiply it by the number of steps after step 6, resulting in an average turnaround time of approximately 134.40 minutes.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question is asking to calculate the average information turnaround time for a defect made at step 6 of a production process. Given the process consists of 36 steps with a cycle time of 0.58 min/unit and there is an average inventory of 232 units between step 6 and the end of the process, we can start by determining how many steps are after step 6, which amounts to 30 steps (36 total - 6 initial = 30). We assume the inventory is evenly distributed across these steps. Therefore, each of the remaining 30 steps would have 232 units / 30 steps ≈ 7.73 units of inventory. As each unit has a cycle time of 0.58 minutes, the time for one defect to traverse one step would be 7.73 units * 0.58 min/unit ≈ 4.48 minutes.

To find the average information turnaround time for a defect made at step 6, we multiply the time for one defect to traverse one step by the number of steps remaining: 4.48 minutes/step * 30 steps ≈ 134.40 minutes.