Clarity Consultants is a business consulting firm. They take consulting projects from clients and make recommendations based on their analysis. They also conduct industry analysis every two years and sell these reports.

Clarity Consultants is trying to analyze ways in which they can provide better service to their clients. They want to apply the lessons fromThe Goalto their business.Their analysis shows that the bottleneck happens to be their in-house printing services.

The in-house printing services were created to deliver quality confidential reports at the end of each consulting project. Since these reports are confidential, they do not want to send them to any external printer. In-house printing also prints the industry reports.

The printing office has one high-speed printer, as well as one high-speed copier, both of which can handle color or black and white jobs. It has one employee, Max. The printer prints out the consulting reports in color, and the copier makes as many copies as is needed.Further analysis shows that the printer is the bottleneck.

Max uses the printer to print out the reports before making enough copies for the consultants, the clients and for the library. It is a network printer. Since it is the fastest printer in the world, the vice-presidents sometimes use it to print overdue internal documents, which are mostly black and white.

Clarity still owns their old printer, which was slower and could not do color printing. They are trying to sell the old printer since they no longer use it.

Max is a very knowledgeable employee, and his expertise is often used in meetings to change the presentation of the reports.

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Use the lessons fromThe Goalto list three ideas for how to manage the bottleneck. For each idea you give, state the main principle involved, briefly state an example of how the principle was applied inThe Goal, and then briefly state your recommendation for Clarity Consultants.

Do not repeat the same principle more than once.An example (answer (a)) is given below to help clarify the question, but the princile shown in the example cannot be repeated.

a) Principle: Increase bottleneck capacity.

Example fromThe Goal: Used old machines to increase the processing rate at NCX-10.

Recommendation for Clarity Consultants: Use the old printer for black and white jobs.

a)Principle______________________________________________________________

Example from theGoal_____________________________________________________

Recommendation____________________________________________________________