Exam 7: Process Selection, Design, and Analysis

You were just promoted to manage the process defined by the four stages A to D below.This process could be a human resource management, marketing, accounting, finance, or engineering process and you are the manager.This is your chance to impress your boss and be promoted again.After three months on the job you realize something is not right with the process because your employees experience big pile ups of work, things take too long to be processed, the opportunity for error is increasing, and the entire process is approaching chaos.Do a process and capacity analysis of this process.The numbers in parentheses (#) are the times in minutes to complete one unit of work.Demand on the process averages 30 units per hour and each unit must be worked on by all four stages.Administrative clerk(s) do Stage A work.The assistant manager(s) do Stages C and D work.The coding specialist(s) do Stage B work. Currently, there are 3 administrative clerks, 2 coding specialist, and 3 assistant managers on duty. Each assistant manager is cross-trained so he/she can do Stage C or Stage D work. a.Which stage of work is the bottleneck? What is the capacity (in units per hour) at the bottleneck stage? b.What should the throughput rate be set at so that the utilization at the bottleneck stage is 90%? c.Based on your throughput rate found in question b above, what will be the utilization at each of the work stages?

A company can differentiate itself from its competitors by positioning itself along the diagonal of the Product-Process matrix.

An automobile emissions testing center has six (6) inspectors and tests 50 autos per hour.Each inspector can inspect twelve (12) autos per hour.If the center wants a utilization of 90%, how many inspectors are required?

Define reengineering.How does it differ from other approaches to process improvement?

The terms, "general purpose equipment," "flexible and capable of customizing work" and "wide variety of goods or services" best relate to

An accounting firm is capable of processing 20 EZ tax forms per day and the average number of forms on-hand in the office is 64 forms.The average processing time per EZ tax form is

The service positioning matrix suggests that services should try to position themselves off the diagonal in order to achieve superior performance.

In designing processes, one often starts at the detail level and moves progressively toward the aggregate.