Healthy Chocolate Inc. Case

Healthy Chocolate Inc. is a small manufacturing company that produces different custom made chocolate bars for different occasions and per special orders. The plant in which these chocolate bars are produced is a semi-automated facility, which can produce different types and shapes of chocolate products. One of the products Healthy Chocolate produces is called Sham-Nut, which has been favorite among teen agers. Regularly the demand for this product has been 60 boxes of bars per day and the plant has allocated three hours per day for its production. The production stages for a typical batch (skid) of this product are shown in the following table.

Stage	Description	Duration (hours)	Predecessors
A	Pouring Molten Chocolate and nuts mix	4	--
B	Pouring in flat trays	6	--
C	Compressing/perforating the chocolate in the tray	2	A
D	Cutting the mix to ordered sizes/shapes	6	A
E	Removing the excess mix from the trays	3	B, C
F	Cooling/flipping the trays	3	B, C
G	Wrapping chocolate bars with the right labels	5	D, E, F
H	Packing the wrapped bars in boxes	1	G

Kim Pouch, the operations manager of the company is concerned with two issues in the production. She is first concerned about the efficiency of sanitization and complying with health regulations. Using the three steamers available, the sanitization crew have arbitrarily divided the plant into three departments and Kim is wondering if with this arrangement the machinery would be sanitized for production. Her goal is to produce 20 batches of Sham-Nut per month and she can allocate only 160 hours of plant operation to this product. She wants to be darn sure that she has the right number of workstations doing the right task so she could direct the sanitization crew. Secondly she is concerned about the supplies of nut milk which is the key ingredient of Sham-Nut. While up to three nearly identical suppliers are available, they all reside in a location prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and earthquakes. Kim believes that the probability in any year of a super-event that might shut down all suppliers at the same time for at least two weeks is 3%. Such a total shutdown would cost the company approximately $400 000. She estimates the unique event risk for any of the suppliers to be 5% and she knows the marginal cost of managing an additional supplier is $15 000 per year. The three suppliers she works with are nearly identical.

Being engaged in production of so many products, Kim Pouch has asked you to help her with the following:

1. Would Kim be able to meet her objective with the three workstations the sanitization crew have adopted?
2. How should she balance with the most following task heuristic (What tasks are assigned to which stations?)
3. What would be the efficiency of this balanced line?
4. How many suppliers should Healthy Chocolate use for successful production? Using Decision Tree technique, walk Kim through this decision.