3 The headquarters of a major creative agency offered a service to all its global subsidiaries that included the preparation of a budget estimate that was submitted to potential clients when making a ‘pitch’ for new work.

This service had been offered previously only to a few of the groups subsidiary companies. Now that it was to be offered worldwide, it was deemed appropriate to organise the process of compiling budget estimates on a more systematic basis. It was estimated that the worldwide demand for this service would be around 20 budget estimates per week, and that, on average, the staff who would put together these estimates would be working a 35-hour week. The elements within the total task of compiling a budget estimate are shown in Table 6.4 .

(a) What is the required cycle time for this process?

(b) How many people will the process require to meet the anticipated demand of 20 estimates per week?

(c) Assuming that the process is to be designed on a ‘long-thin’ basis, what elements would each stage be responsible for completing? And what would be the balancing loss for this process?

(d) Assuming that instead of the long-thin design, two parallel processes are to be designed, each with half the number of stations of the long-thin design, what now would be the balancing loss?