A small, privately owned Asian company is producing a private-label soft drink Yoggo. A bottling line puts the soft drinks into plastic bottles and then packages the bottles into boxes holding 10 bottles each. The bottling line is comprised of the following 4 steps: (1) the bottling machine takes 1 second to fill a bottle, (2) the lid machine takes 3 seconds to cover the bottle with a lid, (3) a labeling machine takes 3 seconds per bottle, and (4) the packaging machine takes 4 seconds to place a bottle into a box. When a box has been filled with 10 bottles, a worker tending the packaging machine removes the filled box and replaces it with an empty box. Assume that the time for the worker to remove a filled box and replace it with an empty box is negligible and hence does not affect the capacity of the line.

Process step Number of machines Seconds per bottle
Bottling 1 3
Apply a lid 1 6
Labeling 1 4
Packaging 1 7

a. What is the capacity (bottles/hour) at the resource "Apply a lid"? bottles per hour
b. What is the bottleneck in the process?
c. Assuming unlimited demand, what would be the flow rate? bottles per hour
d. Assuming unlimited demand, what would be the utilization at resource "Apply a lid"? percent
e. How long would it take to produce 430 bottles assuming this is a machine-paced process that starts empty? seconds