EWMBA 204 OPERATIONS Concept Check #1 E-Commerce Fulfillment Center An e-commerce retailer operates a fulfillment center that has four basic steps: picking, sorting, packaging, and loading. The staffing and processing times (for each worker) of the four steps are given in the table below: Q1. What is the capacity of this process in orders/hour? Q2. Starting from an empty system, how long (in minutes) does it take to process 100 orders? Q3. Suppose they hire one additional worker to work at the bottleneck. What would their new capacity of the process be in orders/hour? Q4. Suppose the firm doesn't hire any additional workers but considers reassigning workers from one step to another with the goal of maximizing its capacity. For example, one worker could be removed from Picking and reassigned to Sorting. After that reassignment, Picking would have 18 workers and Sorting would have 11. The firm can reassign as many workers as it wishes and processing times remain the same as listed above. After the reassignment, what would be the firm's capacity in orders/hour