Reference no: EM132262634
Mr. K’s is a very popular hair salon. It offers high-quality hair-styling and physical relaxation services at a reasonable price, so it always has unlimited demand. The service process includes five activities that are conducted in the sequence described below. (The time required for each activity is shown in parenthesis):
Activity 1: Welcome a guest and offer homemade herb tea. (10 minutes)
Activity 2: Wash and condition hair. (10 minutes)
Activity 3: Neck, shoulder, and back stress release massage. (10 minutes)
Activity 4: Design the hairstyle and do the hair. (25 minutes)
Activity 5: Check out the guest. (5 minutes)
Three servers (S1, S2, and S3) offer the services in a worker-paced line. The assignment of tasks to servers is the following:
? S1 does Activity 1.
? S2 does Activities 2 and Activity 3.
? S3 does Activities 4 and Activity 5.
a) Which server is the bottleneck of the process?
b) Assume that the shop starts empty at 10:00 am. What time is it when the shop has serviced the 25th customer?
c) What is the utilization of server 2? (You can assume that the process operates at capacity and you do not have to consider any empty system effects.)
d) What is the average labor utilization of the servers? Assume the process operates at its capacity and there are no empty system effects.
e) Assume a wage rate of $18 per hour. What are the direct labor costs for one guest?
To increase the service rate, Mr. K’s is considering two alternatives:
Alternative I: To hire a new employee to help anyone (and only one) of the servers without changing the tasks performed by each server.
Alternative II: To redesign the assignment of tasks to servers. For this, Mr. K’s is evaluating to reassign Activity 5 from S3 to S1.
f) What would be the costs of direct labor of serving one guest under each of the two alternatives? Assume that the system operates at its capacity and there are no empty system effects.