Capacity Forum

1. What are some major capacity issues in a hospital? How do they differ from those of a factory?

Some of the major capacity issues in a hospital are that they aren't able to hold all the patients and accept all incoming patients, also they may not have enough staff to take care of the patients. There are some hospitals that have a limit on the amount of patients and not all hospitals treat the same thing (some specialize in different things). The factories are able to produce in advance by the demand they receive from the customers, with the hospital you never know when a patient will walk through the door.

2. Explain how having more Work-in-Process inventory can improve the efficiency of a process. How can this be bad?

When you have more work-in-process inventory you can improve the efficiency of a process because everything you need is there and it also helps you stay on a good time schedule. It can be bad depending on the type of product and you can be left with too much inventory in stock.

3. You have timed Joe Smith assembling widgets. Over two cycles, he averaged 12 minutes. He is one of your best workers and you believe none of the other nine workers could beat his time. Would you make his time the standard for making 5,000 widgets? If not, what else should you do?

I would take the average of the 10 workers and set that as the stand time. I would only do this because this could give everyone the chance to improve if they need too. And for the workers that cant keep up, I would let them go.

4. Why would managers be skeptical about Job Enrichment and socio-technical approaches to job design?

I think managers world be skeptical about job enrichment because enriched work invariable contains a mix of tasks that causes interruptions in rhythm and different motions switching from one task to the next (pg 189). As for socio-technical systems, studies have revealed that work groups could effectively handle many production problems better than management if they were permitted to make their own decision on scheduling, work allocation among members, bonus sharing and so forth (pg 189).

Question: As a manager would you prefer job enrichment or socio-technical approaches to job design?