Capicity Planning Practice Questions

A large and growing retail chain is opening a new warehousing operation that will operate 8 hours per day. They expect 256 tracks to drop off and then pick up products each weekday. Trucks enter each loading dock one at a time and it takes 50 minutes to unload and then refill a truck before it can leave.

Each truck carries an average of 24 pallets of merchandise at any one time. Truck teams of two people are responsible for moving merchandise on and off of the trucks and tracking inventory received and sent. Each of these teams is assigned to a loading dock. For every three truck teams, there is one extra employee that will cover breaks and help coordinate work.

Lift trucks are used to pick up merchandise from the loading docks and place it in its proper storage area of the warehouse. On their return, these lifts bring other merchandise from the warehouse and deliver it to the loading docks to later be placed on trucks for delivery.

It takes an average of 2.5 minutes for a lift truck to transport merchandise between the loading dock and the storage areas (one way). Lifts are not assigned to specific loading docks and each con carry only one pallet at a time.

Using the Naive approach, calculate the minimum requirements for:

The number of loading docks that need to be built (Facility requirements)

The number of Lift trucks needed (Equipment requirements)

The number of employees working as part of the truck teams (Labour requirements)

How many more trucks could be serviced (if any) without having to build more loading docks?