Horton Corporation currently has four products that it is processing through its paint shop, which is its bottleneck operation. The paint shop is available for use 24 hours a day, which is 1,440 minutes per day. However, it requires substantial downtime for cleaning, so the paint shop is really only available for 1,200 minutes per day. The following production schedule shows the jobs that are scheduled to run through the paint shop during the next month, in descending order by throughput per minute.
|
Product Description |
Throughput per Minute of Bottleneck |
Required Bottleneck Usage |
Scheduled Production in Units |
Bottleneck Usage (minutes) |
Throughput per Product |
|
Three tone widget |
$36 |
3 |
150 |
450 |
$16,200 |
|
Two tone widget |
25 |
2 |
125 |
250 |
6,250 |
|
Black widget |
18 |
1 |
200 |
200 |
3,600 |
|
Blue widget |
5 |
1 |
300 |
300 |
1,500 |
|
Total |
775 |
1,200 |
$27,550 |
The table shows that the paint shop bottleneck is fully utilized, and that the minimum amount of throughput per minute scheduled through it is three hundred minutes of time to paint blue widgets, at $5 of throughput per minute.