Written Assignment: National Cranberry Cooperative.
This is a challenging case, please allocate sufficient amount of time. In doing the analysis, you may make the following assumptions: a) An average busy day has a continuous arrival rate of berries of 1,500bbs/hr. b) There are 20 busy days in the average growing season.
c) Assume there is sufficient capacity in Bagging and Bulking. d) The case description of how many workers are needed when the plant runs over time is vague. Assume that there are 20 workers and that they are evenly split between full time and seasonal employees.
Consider the following questions. The write-up should address Question 6: 1. Draw a detailed process flow map of the current process at Receiving Plant #1. What is the capacity of each process step? 2. What is the maximum long-term achievable throughput rate of Receiving Plant #1? What factors affect this throughput rate?
3. Currently what is (are) the major reason(s) for trucks waiting and excessive overtime? 4. On average, how long will the trucks have to wait on a busy day? Assume a 7am start of processing of berries. 5. What benefits would you expect if processing time was moved up from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. during the peak period? Should this be done for the entire season? 6. What are your recommendations to NCC on how to deal with their problems? You may use the Excel workbook NCC.xls (available on the course page) to analyze this case, although the analysis can be done without it.
Instructions about case write-up
All case write‐ups and problem sets are to be done in teams. The goal of the team approach to case prep is to have you think and experiment while sensitizing you to those issues that are novel and that will be further discussed in class. In preparing your write‐up, please adhere to the following guidelines: * Be concise and well‐structured: Recommendations should be summarized on the first page and be complemented by a crystal clear discussion on how...
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