Question

Mini Case: Kristen’s Cookie Company You and your roommate are preparing to start Kristen’s Cookie Company in your on-campus apartment. The company will provide fresh cookies to starving students late at night. You have done a preliminary market analysis and are confident that you can charge a price that is high enough to make a good profit, but low enough to maintain reasonable demand. Business Concept Your idea is to bake fresh cookies to order, using any combination of your basic ingredients that the buyer wants. The cookies will be ready for pickup at your apartment within an hour. Several factors will set you apart from competing products such as store-bought cookies. First, your cookies will be completely fresh. You will not bake any cookies before receiving the order; therefore, the buyer will be getting cookies that are literally hot out of the oven. You have decided to sell cookies only by the dozen (although, of course, a given customer could place an order for two or more dozen cookies). Second, you will have a variety of ingredients available to add to the basic dough, including chocolate chips, M&M’s, coconut, walnuts, and raisins. Buyers will telephone in their orders and specify which of these ingredients they want in their cookies. You guarantee completely fresh cookies. In short, you will have the freshest, most exotic cookies anywhere, available right on campus. The Production Process Baking cookies is simple: mix all the ingredients in a food processor; dish the cookie dough onto a tray; put the cookies into the oven; bake them; take the tray of cookies out of the oven; let the cookies cool; and, finally, take the cookies off the tray and carefully pack them in a box. You and your roommate already own all the necessary capital equipment: one food processor, cookie trays, and spoons. Your apartment has a small oven that will hold one tray at a time. A detailed examination of the production process, which specifies how long each of the steps will take, follows. The first step is to take an order. Your roommate has already figured out how to do this quickly and with 100 percent accuracy. (Actually, you and your roommate devised a method using the campus electronic mail system to accept orders and to inform customers when their orders will be ready for pickup. Because this runs automatically on your personal computer, it does not take any of your time.) Therefore, this step will be ignored in further analysis. You and your roommate have timed the necessary physical operations. The first physical production step is "wash and mix," in which you wash out the mixing bowl from the previous batch, add all of the ingredients for the next order, and mix them in your food processor. The activities in this step take six minutes per dozen cookies. The mixing bowl can hold ingredients for slightly more than one dozen cookies. You then dish the cookies onto a cookie tray. This takes two minutes. The next step, "load and bake," which is performed by your roommate, is to put the cookies in the oven and set the thermostat and timer, which takes about one minute. The cookies bake for the next nine minutes. So total baking time is 10 minutes, during the first minute of which your roommate is busy setting the oven. Because the oven only holds one tray, a second dozen would take an additional 10 minutes to bake. Your roommate also performs the last steps of the process by removing the cookies from the oven and putting them aside to “cool” for five minutes, then carefully “packing” them in a box and accepting payment. Removing the cookies from the oven takes only a negligible amount of time, but it must be done promptly. It takes two minutes to pack each dozen and about one minute to accept payment for the order. That is the process for producing cookies by the dozen in Kristen’s Cookie Company. As experienced bakers know, a few simplifications were made in describing the actual cookie production process. For example, the first batch of cookies for the night requires preheating the oven. However, such complexities will be put aside for now. Source: Adapted from Davis, M.M, Aquilano, N.J., and Chase, R.B., 2003. Fundamentals of Operations Management, 4th ed., McGraw-Hill Irwin: Boston.

Question 1 (4 points) What is the bottleneck of the cookie-making process?

Options 1:  “load and bake” “packing” “cool” “wash and mix”

Question 2 (4 points) What is the cycle time of process step “wash and mix”?

options: 1 dozen/ 6 minutes 1 dozen/ 3 minutes 3 minutes/dozen 6 minutes/dozen

Question 3 Saved How many orders could you fill most in a night, assuming you are open four hours each night?

options: 25 23 22 24

Question 4 : How long will it take you to fill in a rush order assuming no other cookies are currently in process?

Options - 26 21 10 24

Question 5 - How many orders can you fill in a night, assuming you are operating for 4 hours but you are doing it yourself instead of your roommate being with you

Options - 9 23 10 24

Answer 1

The process can be summarized in a chart as follows:

Step	Description	Resource	Time (minutes)
1	wash and mix	you	6
2	dish the cookies	you	2
3	load and bake	roommate	1
4	baking	oven	9
5	cool	n/a	5
6	pack	roommate	2
7	accept payment	roommate	1

--------------------------------------------------

Q1. "Load and Bake"

Load and Bake takes the longest time , i.e. 10 minutes

Therefore, bottleneck operation is "Load and Bake"

--------------------------------------------------

Q2. 6 minutes/down

Cycle time of process setp "wash and mix" = 6 minutes/dozen

--------------------------------------------------

Q3. 23

The first order will take 6+2+1+9 = 18 minutes to bake . Thereafter, cycle time will be 10 minutes /batch

Most number of orders filled in a night = 1 + (4*60-18)/10

= 23 orders

--------------------------------------------------

Q4. 26

Total time to fill in a rush order = SUM of all activity times

= 6+2+1+9+5+2+1

= 26

--------------------------------------------------