Consider a production line with four stations in continuous order 1-2-3-4. Station 1 has three identical machines, each of which can produce 4 units/min. Station 2 can produce 8 units/min.Station 3 has two simultaneous lines: one line has two CONTINUOUS machines (one follows the other) and each of them produces 9 units/min and 6 units /min respectively; the other line has only one machine producing 8 units/min. Station 4 can produce 10 units/ min.

1. a) Which station is the bottleneck station?
2. b) What is the system cycle time?
3. c) What is the system process time and capacity?
4. d) What if another parallel machine of station 1 is added? Will this improve the system and why?
5. e) If the machine line operates 8 hour a day and 5 days a week, then what is the weekly capacity of the process.