The “Quite a Stir” food truck serves customers by taking orders and making fresh batches of stir-fry. Customers have only one choice during the lunch hour so that Quite a Stir can maximize the number of customers served. Assume each customer places just one lunch order and all the lunch orders are the same size- one serving of stir-fry.
The stir-fry cooking works in this manner. First, one person cooks a batch of orders in a wok. The cooking depends on the number of orders in the batch. The time to cook just one order is 3 minutes. For each additional order in the batch, it takes .5 minutes (30 seconds) more to cook. Thus, cooking two orders in a batch takes 3.5 minutes, cooking three orders takes 4 minutes, and so on. The other process is batting and accepting payments (done by a separate person), which takes .80 minutes per order.
POST:
Part One: Given this situation:
a. What is the set-up time of this process?
b. If Quite a Stir operates with batch sizes of 6 units, what is their process capacity (in orders per minute)?
c. If Quite a Stir operates with batch sizes of 10 units, what is the utilization rate of the wok?
Part Two: (of the POST:) Of course this is a simplified example and only measures some basic units- setup-time, process capacity, and batch size at a given utilization. Identify and briefly discuss three important things you believe would materially affect real scenario of the information gained in these calculations. That is, what are some practical things that affect this situation that are important and would materially affect the day-to-day operation of the food truck from a production standpoint- creating oversimplification, errors in judgement, or things that weren’t considered.
