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.
- What is the capacity of the process, and what is the bottleneck?
- What is the throughput time of a typical order?
- 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?
- 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?
- What assumptions have you made in these calculations that may not be reasonable?