Question

Guests are arriving at a party at a rate of 12 per minute. Each guest will be checked in, served a drink, and accompanied to his/her table by one receptionist, one bartender, and one usher respectively. Both the receptionist and usher can serve 10 guests per minute, whereas the bartender takes 5 minutes to serve one guest. Which resource is the bottleneck and what is the process capacity in guests per minute?

(a)	Bartender, 0.2

(b) Bartender, 5

(c) Usher, 5

(d) Receptionist, 10

Answer 1

The bottleneck can be defined as the process step or the station in the flow diagram with the lowest capacity i.e. the “weakest link”. Even though the bottleneck is often the process step with the longest processing time, it is always important to look at the capacities before making a judgment.

Therefore, from our question above, the bottleneck occurs at the bartender who took 5 minutes to serve one guess.

Now the process capacity, which tells us how many flow units the process can produce in a given period of time, to find this we will look at the Takt time where we will find the inverse of the flow rate.

Number of persons arriving at the party = 12units/minute

Process capacity is always equivalent to the capacity of the bottleneck, therefore 1min/5 guess per minute = 0.2 guess/minute

Answer: (a) Bartender, 0.2