Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Responding to emails:
The flow unit is an email message, and the process boundary is from the arrival of
message into your inbox until the message is responded to and archived in
another folder or deleted. The average flow rate is 50 messages per day and the
average WIP is 150 messages. Hence, the average flow time is 150/50 = 3 days.
3. Accounts receivable:
The flow unit is one dollar of accounts receivable, and the process boundary is
from the moment the customer is billed for an equipment sale until the payment
is received. The average flow rate is $300 million per year and the average WIP is
$45 million. Hence, the average flow time is 45/300 = 0.15 year or about 55 days.
Service No. Buses required during peak Buses required during non-peak
201 45/10 = 5 60/15 = 4
202 35/10 = 4 50/15 = 4
203 25/10 = 3 45/15 = 3
204 55/10 = 6 70/15 = 5
Total buses 18 16
required
b. The flow unit here is one generic bus and its process boundary is loop 201,
then rest, followed by loop 202, then rest, and so on until the rest after loop
204. For peak period, the average flow time is 45 + 35 + 25 + 55 = 160 minutes
while the average flow rate is still 1 bus per 10 minutes. This gives a WIP of
160/10 = 16 buses. For non-peak period, the average flow time is 60 + 50 + 45
+ 70 = 225 minutes, while the average flow rate is still 1 bus per 15 minutes.
This gives a WIP of 225/15 = 15 buses. In the dedicated scenario, the fleet size
is 18 while here the fleet is 16, giving us a savings of 2 buses. This is one of the
benefits of using a “pooling strategy”.