The Fine Crate Company has several machines that cut wooden planks used for building storage pallets and automatically load them into rolling bins for trans- portation and handling. Each bin holds 100 planks and each machine cuts and loads the planks into bins at a rate of 250 planks per hour. A single-sided storage pallet requires 8 planks and the Fine Crate Company builds 300 of these pallets during the first 4 hours of every day. (After the first 4 hours, the Fine Crate Com- pany switches to building crates, which don't use planks as components.) The Fine Crate Company has a dozen plank transportation bins, which it works to keep filled throughout the work day.

Questions 

1. How long would a single plank-cutting machine need to run to produce exactly the number of planks required for 1 day's assembly of storage pallets? 

2. If the Fine Crate Company were to use a kanban loop to control plank production, how many kanban cards should circulate in that loop, assuming a policy variable of 20%? 

3. The storage pallets described in this scenario are called "single sided" pallets, because they have only one side. Occasionally the Fine Crate Company spends the first 4 hours of the day making the same number of pallets but building them double-sided, which requires twice as many planks. How many kanban cards should circulate in the new plank production loop on those particular days? 

4. A neighboring job shop is interested in buying one or more of the rolling bins that the Fine Crate Company uses for transporting planks. Assuming that the Fine Crate Company doesn't use the bins for anything else, how many are available for sale if they switch to the kanban system? Recall that the Fine Crate Company primarily produces single-sided pallets, but occasionally produces double-sided pallets.