Everyday Snow Cones
Part 1: You run Everyday Snow-Cones, a shop that sells 8 oz. strawberry flavored snow cones
to your local community at a $5 price tag. There has been a surge in the demand for snow
cones recently and four competitors have opened up their business in your territory:
• Brainfreeze, sells 8 oz. strawberry flavored snow cones for $2 each.
• Antarctic, sells 8 oz. snow cones for $5 each but offers strawberry, blueberry, peach, and
banana flavors.
• Penguin, sells 8 oz. strawberry and blueberry flavored snow cones of $4.5 each.
• Southpole, sells 8 oz. strawberry or blueberry flavored snow cones for $4 each.
1) Where is your company situated in the above graph?
2) Which of the following actions will put your company on the efficient frontier?
A. Sell strawberry, blueberry, and peach flavor snow cones for $5 each
B. Sell strawberry flavor snow cones only for $4 each
C. Sell strawberry and blueberry flavor snow cones for $3.5 each
D. Sell strawberry and blueberry flavor snow cones for $4.25 each
E. Sell strawberry, blueberry, peach, and banana flavor snow cones for $5.5 each
Part 2: A diagram of the process flow at Everyday Snow-Cones and the time required to
complete each step of the process is given below:
You can assume that each customer orders one snow cone, the shop has plenty of room for
waiting, and the buffers between two successive steps are sufficiently large. The shop
employs one employee at each step.
3) What is the flow time (throughput time) of this process?
4) What is the bottleneck resource in this process?
5) What is the capacity (maximum throughput rate possible) of the process?
6) What is the cycle time (time between 2 finished cones), if the process is running at
capacity?
7) Suppose 1 customer walks into the shop every minute and demand for 1 snow cone. What
will be the throughput rate & cycle time of this process at this particular demand rate?
8) Suppose you hire 2 employees to work at the “fill cup with ice” station. How would this
impact the bottleneck and the capacity of this process?
Larry’s Laundry
Larry has been very busy studying for his midterm exams, which has led to a buildup of quite
a lot of dirty laundry – Larry is running low on clean cloths, and his roommates are starting
to complain about the smell!
Larry has carefully examined his laundry process, and has determined that it takes him 30
minutes to sort one load of laundry and 5 minutes to load the washer. The washer (which
luckily Larry has in his apartment) takes 45 minutes per load. Larry spends 5 minutes
switching the load from washer to dryer, and then dries the load for 60 minutes. Then he
removes the dry clothes in 5 minutes. It takes him 15 minutes to fold each load of laundry
and 5 minutes to put the clothes away.
1. Draw the process flow diagram.
2. What are the resources in this process? Mark on your process diagram the resources that
are busy during each activity.
3. What is the process capacity? You may fill the table below to help answer this question.
Resource Total processing time Capacity of
(to complete one load) resource
4. If Larry only had one load of laundry to do, how long would it take before this load is
complete?
5. If Larry had 10 loads of laundry to do, how long would it take before the last load is
completed?
6. Suppose that Larry has decided to purchase a second dryer that is identical to his existing
dryer. What is the new process capacity? You may fill the table below to help with this
question.
Resource Number of Total processing time Capacity of Capacity of
pool resources of one resource individual resource pool
(to complete one load) resource