From the course: Operations Management Foundations
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Assembly lines and tradeoffs
From the course: Operations Management Foundations
Assembly lines and tradeoffs
- Production processes seek to make things well, make them quickly and with minimal resources. In order to do these things, a production system must have a goal. It must know how many products it will need to produce in a certain period of time. For example, suppose we know that a production system must produce 20 units every hour. That would mean the production line would need to complete a new unit every three minutes. That's our cycle time. Cycle time is the production time divided by demand. The production time is one hour, or 60 minutes, and the required demand is 20 units, so we get a cycle time of three minutes. This number, cycle time, is important because it means that we can't give any single worker on our production line more than three minutes of work per unit. If we did give them more than three minutes of work per unit, they would become a bottleneck, and the system would slow down, and we would not be able…
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