Case Study - Car Parts Wholesaler A business customer submits an order for a car part (an order item) to Car Parts Wholesaler (CPW), a wholesale car parts warehouse, through either emailing (20%) or faxing (80%) the order details to the order processing clerk. The order processing clerk at CPW reviews the accumulated orders several times a day (on avg. every 1 hr) and enters them into the computer: If the order was placed by fax, the clerk takes on avg. 1 minute per item to key the order information into the processing system. However, for an email order this step takes on avg. only 0.75 minutes. In both cases, the clerk is using a browser-based order form to enter the item's order information and the product ID (the customer's name, e-mail address, shipping address, the product ID and name of ordered item). Then the order processing clerk checks the database (avg. 0.1min) for the current inventory of the ordered item according to the product ID. If the item is in stock, the clerk flags it as 'sold' and marks it in the computer system as 'ready to pack' (avg. 1 min). If the item is not in stock (25%) the order for the item is deleted and the customer is informed via email (avg. 2 minutes). When the ordered item pops up on the warehouse computer as 'ready to pack' it is packed by the warehouse dispatchers (avg. 3 minutes) while simultaneously the accounts assistant creates an invoice (avg. 1.25 minute). Just before the courier arrives each day at CPW's 5pm closing time, the warehouse dispatchers calculate the final total price incl. freight and complete the invoice for the ordered item (avg. 1.5 minutes) which is then added to the package ready for pickup. Demand is 16 orders per hour. page 1: cover page page 2: the exported model in landscape orientation with swimlanes and business items page 3: flow time calculations page 4: capacity calculations (capacity per hour, demand is 16 per hour), bottleneck, WIP page 5: apply 8 wastes of Lean