Your firm makes bicycles and ships them to four different distributors: Asiago, Brie, Colby, and Derby. You are looking at your product shipment methods as a process. The distributors are located as follows:
Asiago is located 1,200 miles from your finished goods warehouse; you ship via trucks, trucks average 50 mi/hr – 20 hrs/day
Brie is 1,600 miles from the warehouse; you also ship product via trucks; trucks average 50 mi/hr – 20 hrs/day
Colby is 3,600 miles from the plant,
- you load railcars at your f.g. warehouse, this takes 1 day
-rail transport averages 40mi /hr–24 hrs per day
-unloading at Colby’s takes 1 day
Derby is 5,000 miles away,
-you ship the 1st 1,000 mi to the seaport via truck–average 50 mi/hr–10hr/day
- Loading the ship takes 2 days
- Ship transports product there maining distance to the destination port which is at Derby’s location. Ship averages 15 mi/hr – 24 hr/day
-Unloading the ship at the destination and clearing customs takes 4 days
At your finished goods warehouse, bicycles are packed in containers.
- Each container holds 48 bicycles.
- Each truck transports 2 containers.
-Each railcar can transport as many as 4 containers.
- One ship can transport as many as 5,000 containers. You do not have to fill the ship...
The monthly demand for each distributor is:
- Asiago – 48,000 bicycles
- Brie – 36,000 bicycles
- Colby - 60,000 bicycles
- Derby – 144,000 bicycles
1. Identify the best flow units for this process analysis:
a) Asiago shipments
b) Brie shipments
c) Colby shipments
d) Derby shipments
2. Create a process flow diagram for the transport process. Be sure to include processes, inventory locations. The start of the process is the finished goods warehouse; the ends are at the four distributors’ warehouses.
3. Based on Little’s Law, calculate how many flow units need to be in the process (shipping to each distributor) at any point in time to insure that they continuously meet demand, i.e. do not run out of product. Assume 7 day/week for transport processing, 30 days/month for demand. Identify how many flow units arein EACH process step. Also recognize that you must ship fullt rucks and rail cars–no decimal shipments...
4. We are launching a new bicycle model on January 1, 2019. To make this schedule, we must deliver one month’s demand to each distributor by December 31, 2018. What is the latest date we can ship the new model to each of the distributors to meet this requirement?