A final assembly plant for a certain automobile model is to have a capacity of 240,000 units annually. The plant will operate 50 wk/yr, 2 shifts/day, 5 days/ wk, and 8.0 hr/shift. It will be divided into three departments:

(1) body shop,

(2) paint shop,

(3) trimchassis-final department.

The body shop welds the car bodies using robots, and the paint shop coats the bodies. Both of these departments are highly automated. Trim-chassis-final has no automation. There are 15.5 hr of direct labor content on each car in this department, where cars are moved by a continuous conveyor. Determine

(a) hourly production rate of the plant,

(b) number of workers and workstations required in trim-chassis-final if no automated stations are used, the average manning level is 2.5, balancing efficiency = 93%, proportion uptime = 95%, and a repositioning time of 0.15 min is allowed for each worker.