Chapter 2.2, Problem 2.28ACI

Items arriving and departing a work center. In a manufacturing plant, a work center is a specific production facility that consists of one or more people and/or machines and is treated as one unit for the purposes of capacity requirements for planning and job scheduling. If jobs arrive at a particular work center at a faster rate than they depart, the work center impedes the overall production process and is referred to as a bottleneck. The data in the table at the bottom of the page were collected by an operations manager for use in investigating a potential bottleneck work center. Construct dot plots for the two sets of data. Do the dot plots suggest that the work center may be a bottleneck? Explain.