Question: The Swanky Hotel provides room service for its guests. The process for room service begins with a room service manager who takes orders by phone at an average of 2 minutes per order. The manager then sends the order to the kitchen, where it takes a cook an average of 16 minutes to prepare the food for each order. There are four cooks in the kitchen. If the customer orders a beverage, the room service manager sends the order to the bar at the same time the order is sent to the kitchen. It takes 3 minutes for a bartender to fill the order, and 80 percent of the orders require a beverage. When the kitchen and bar orders are both ready, a waiter takes them to the room and bills the guest. There are six waiters to provide the service, and each order takes 20 minutes for the waiter to complete.

a. What is the capacity of the process, and what is the bottleneck?

b. What is the throughput time of a typical order?

c. Assume that on Friday evenings an average of 10 room-service orders per hour are placed. How many orders are in the system on average on Friday nights?

d. Assume the following pay rates for the employees. Waiters are paid $9 per hour (not including tips), cooks are paid $15 per hour, the bartender is paid $10 per hour, and the room service manager is paid $18 per hour. Also, assume that 60 percent overhead is added to direct labor and that the cost of food and beverages averages $6 per order.

· What is the average cost of an order when operating at 10 orders per hour?

· What is the minimum cost per order that the system can achieve?

e. What assumptions have you made in these calculations that may not be reasonable?