AuthBridge Research

AuthBridge Research is a services firm that conducts background verification of new employees hired by its clients. The employee verification department of AuthBridge is organized into the following three-step process: Research, Initiation, and Verification. Every case goes first to Research, after that to Initiation, and finally to Verification. The team of Research has 14 members. It takes each member 30 minutes to process a case. The team of Intiation has 4 members. It takes each member 15 minutes to process a case. The team of Verification has 4 members. It takes each member 10 minutes to process a case. Workers work independently and in parallel. There is no variability in processing times. There is a storage bin between Research and Initiation to hold cases waiting to be processed by the Initiation team. The storage bin can hold as many cases as needed. Each worker works at full capacity whenever needed.

A regular work day is from 8am to 4pm. All workers report to work at 8am. The Research team leaves at 4pm every day. The other two teams stay as long as it takes to process all the cases for the day. Whenever there are cases being processed by a team, the entire team stays at work. Each worker is paid at $10/hour during regular hours between 8am to 4pm, and $15/hour for overtime after 4pm. A fraction of an hour is paid as a whole hour.

AuthBridge has very high demand of background verification cases, and it only processes as much as it can with the current capacity and schedule.

To help your analysis, please draw a process flow diagram for this operation.

Process Flow Diagram:

Question:

1. What is the current capacity of this three-step process in number of cases per hour?

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2.Given the current setup and schedule, how many cases can AuthBridge process every day?

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3.What is the utilization of Research team, Initiation team and Verification team, respectively?

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4 (a). At what time does the Initiation team leave work?

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4 (b). At what time does the Verification team leave work?

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5. What is the direct labor cost of one case? Hint: Consider total wage and total output per day.

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6. Assume all workers are cross-trained to perform each step at the speed previously specified. Assume that each worker can be assigned to only one job throughout the day, and multi-tasking is not allowed. Can you reassign workers to improve the capacity of the three-step process? How would you assign workers to each step to achieve the highest possible hourly capacity? And what is the highest possible hourly capacity?

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