Team Project Problem. Quality Products Inc., a company that manufactures high-quality heat-pumps for the housing industry, has a local manufacturing facility. This plant only produces heat-pumps and until recently there was only one basic production process for these items. With the new environmental concerns and government regulations, they have designed and recently brought into production a second product line of heat-pumps. The production processes for the old and new product lines are similar, using the same equipment, but they have slightly different processing sequences and processing times. The product processing sequences are illustrated in Figs. 7.5a and 7.5b. Product 1 is the old heat-pump process and Product 2 is the production sequence for the new line of heat-pumps. This first quarter of 2002 the daily releases of products to be manufactured is 8 units on the product 1 and 2 units of Product 2. The average cycle time for the facility is in the neighborhood of 6.2 days Quality Products Inc. would like to have a consulting team perform a systems analysis for each quarter of the year. They expect that the total of units manufactured to remain at a demand level of 10 per day but the product mix will change each quarter. Their quarterly demand forecasts for daily demands by product type are: First Quarter Second Quarter Third Quarter Fourth Quarter Product 1 8 6 4 2 Product 2 2 4 6 8 The company is concerned about their machining capacities as demands change over time. They would also like to know what the impacts will be on their cycle times and they want to estimate the cycle times for the individual products as well as the facility average. If new machines are needed, they want to get these ordered and installed so that they will not suffer a short-fall in production output versus demand. The top-planning engineer for Quality Products Inc. has developed the data for the old and new product processing steps. The mean processing times (in days) are: Means Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7 Step 8 Product 1 0.008 0.120 0.070 0.070 0.075 0.100 0.070 0.180 Product 2 0.002 0.100 0.090 0.070 0.080 0.080 0.070 0.100 SCV’s Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 7 Step 8 Product 1 1.5 1.2 1.3 1.0 1.6 0.9 1.3 0.5 Product 2 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.3 1.0 1.0 1.3 1.0 There are currently three machines in Workstation 2 and two machines at Workstation 5. The other workstations seem to be operating okay with a single processing machine. Workstation 3 is a heat-treatment process and the current capacity of the machine is two jobs at a time. The product demand data is currently 8 units of Product 1 per day with a SCV of 1.5. Product 2 has a mean demand rate of 2 units per day with an SCV of 0.75. As demand shifts from being predominantly Product 1 to mostly Product 2, the company does not anticipate a change in the SCV’s for the individual products. All of the machines in the factory have a 95% availability factor. The mean repair times are, respectively, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.35, 0.5, days. All repair times are exponentially distributed.