The furniture shack makes custom oak furniture. They are just going through a redesign of the manufacturing plant to better understand how they can improve the process. You speak to the floor manager and he explains the current process and asks if you can help him identify opportunities to improve.

Wood comes in raw from the various bulk suppliers and unloaded off the trucks. There it is inspected by 1 foreman and sequentially sorted into 3 queues to produce the table tops, legs and cross beams. The queues can only hold 2 pieces of wood each to be fed into their respective processes.

The process for making the table tops and legs is quite similar. The wood must be cut appropriately and then separated to be put into a natural or high gloss finish. Before it can go into the finishing machine it has to sit in a queue for a little bit as the finishing machines can be a bit variable.

After finishing the table tops they are inspected by the foreman and then sent off to a separate plant to be put together.

Similarly the legs follow a similar process to the table tops and may be high gloss or natural finish as well.

The crossbeams have a slightly different process as there is no need to separate the finish but rather they have to be cut and then have pre-drilled holes done before finishing and inspection.

Appendix 1 outlines the processing times for all the different components. You should run at least 10 trials to come up with a reasonable range of results.

Bob has a couple of questions for you?

1. How long does it typically take to process a table top, legs and cross beams

2. How well utilized is my inspector?

3. How would the furniture shack benefit from adding an inspector?

4. Which process is the most variable to complete, please provide some rationale.

As the consultant overseeing the project you have reviewed the work and you have some concerns, identify where you think there may be errors or potential concerns with the workflow or details provided in Appendix 1.

Please submit your SIMUL8 File and a printout(s) of your results along with answers to the above

Appendix 1:

work entry pointunlimited arrivals

Initial inspection and sorting Process time Poisson (6)

Batch size 3

Distribute sequentially to Table top queue, Legs queue and cross

beams queue

Table Top Queue Capacity = 2

Table Leg Queue Capacity = 2

Cross Beam Queue Capacity = 2

Table top

cut wood Process Time Exponential (6)

30% go to Natural Queue

70% go to high gloss queue

High gloss queue Capacity 10

Natural finish queueCapacity 5

High gloss finishingProcess time Lognormal (12,3)

Natural FinishingProcess time Lognormal (8,4)

Inspection Process time Lognormal (20,5)

Table Legs

cut woodProcess Time Exponential (12)

30% go to Natural Queue

70% go to high gloss queue

High gloss queue Capacity 15

Natural finish queue Capacity 15

High gloss finishingProcess time normal (15,4)

Natural Finishing Process time normal (10,2)

Inspection Process time normal (25,5)

Cross Beams

Cut Process Time Exponential (6)

Drill Process Time Normal (16,3)

Finish Process Time Exponential (5)

inspect Process Time LogNormal (20,5)