Carolina Mountains River Rafting is an outdoor recreational company offering boat rentals and guided tours along Big River. After some preliminary analysis you identified the customer composition and the main resources used in providing the service. Customers arrive in groups. There are three group categories: 20% of groups rent kayaks; 30% of groups rent 4-person rafts; 50% of groups rent 6-person rafts. On average 16 groups arrive to the rafting company each hour.
The sequence of events in the process is as follows:
All groups must register before they begin. There are 4 Receptionists who register arriving groups. Average registration time per group is 16 minutes.
Next is safety training. 3 Safety Trainers provide water safety training. Kayak groups and 6-person raft groups require a long safety training of 30 minutes whereas 4-person raft groups require a short safety training of 15 minutes.
After safety training, all groups take a bus to their respective "put-in" where they will begin their adventure. There are 3 Bus Drivers. The transportation resource spends an average of 31 minutes roundtrip for kayaks and 4-person rafts, and 38 minutesroundtrip for 6-person rafts.
Groups renting rafts (4-person or 6-person) require one of 12 Guides to escort them down the river which occupies the guide for an average of 139 minutes. You can assume this time includes the transportation time for the guide to the put-in. Groups renting kayaks do not require a guide.
a. Compute the capacity of each of the four resources (registration, safety training, transportation, and guides) and the process overall in total number of group-arrivals per hour.
1. Registration: groups per hour
2. Safety Training: groups per hour
3. Transportation: groups per hour
4. Raft guides: groups per hour.
Overall process capacity: groups per hour.
b. Calculate the flow rate for 6-person raft groups per hour.
Flow Rate = 6-person raft groups per hour.
c. Demand is expected to grow and management is concerned that they don’t have enough capacity to keep up with the growth. They are willing to hire one additional worker in order to increase system capacity.
The new worker should be hired at Resource (1, 2, 3, or 4)
Ignoring the current demand rate, the system can now serve at most an additional groups per hour.
Resource is now the bottleneck (1,2,3 or 4).