Exercise 1 Text

Page 1

Gestione delle Operations Exam – Saturday, November 29th, 2014 page 1/2 OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT EXAM Exercise 1 (11 points) ROBOMES is a small enterprise that produces precision mechanical components for the robotics industry. The production process is quite simple since it is composed only by 3 departments. In particular, one milling department, one thermal process department and one finish department. The pieces enter the production system and are first arranged in a single FIFO-queue before the milling department, which is composed by two technologically identical machines which operate in parallel. The two milling machines are extremely advanced, they have an automat ic quality control directly on board able to identify at 100% the good pieces from the ones that must be discarded. On average, after the manufacturing in the milling department, the 7% of the total pieces that enter the whole production system must be dis carded. These pieces identified as damaged are definitively discarded from the system. The pieces go subsequently to the thermal process, where three technologically identical machines work in parallel each one with its own specific queue. The pieces which enter the thermal process department are arranged in a perfectly equal way in the queues of its three machines. The workers who operate in the thermal process department are highly specialized and they are able to notice directly on the field the presence of pieces with defects which have to be discarded. These pieces are on average the 4% of the pieces that enter the whole thermal process department and they are sent to an external enterprise specialized in their disposal. After the thermal process department, the good piece are addressed to an advanced finish manufacturing or to a simple finish one…