Question: Judy's Cake Shop makes fresh cakes to customer orders. After receiving the order by Judy's assistant, which takes 2 minutes, Judy then takes 8 minutes to mix the ingredients for the cake and loads a cake pan for baking. Then the cake is put into the oven for 30 minutes. The oven can hold three cakes at one time.
When the cake is taken out of the oven, it is cooled for 1 hour. The assistant then takes 2 minutes to pack the cake for pickup and bills the customer, which takes 3 minutes.
a. What is the capacity of the process, and what is the bottleneck?
b. What is the throughput time for a typical cake?
c. If on average five orders are taken per hour, how many cakes are there in the process (on average)?