Operations Problem

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Please see the attached file.

4. Mad Hatter's

You are hired as a consultant to a growing national fast food chain, which serves a mix of basic
sandwiches, salads and gourmet pizzas, and has both eat-in and take-out customers. You are
visiting the Durham restaurant and given the below information about the restaurant.

A description of how customers/food orders arrive and are processed is provided below. In all of
your analysis on this problem, work with long-run averages and ignore unexplained or random
variation. A process flow diagram showing the flow of work through the system and the

processing rates is given below.

Take-out Customers

INFORMATION BAR

The average group of

Eat-in Customers

Order Counter: take orders, process payment

2 servers

Kitchen: prepare food

5 workers

Processing rate:
120 customers/hr

Processing rate:
75 customers/hr

diners (eat-in or take-
out) contains 3 people.
After placing their
order, customers step
aside and wait for their
meals to be prepared.

The orders are
communicated to the
kitchen automatically,
and processed by the
kitchen workers in the
same way (and with the
same speed) as eat-in
orders. However, eat-in
orders get priority over
take-out orders if the
work load gets too
heavy for the kitchen to
handle.

When a group's order is

Eat-In
Customers
Dining Room
30 seats

Processing
Rate:
120 cust./hr

Take-Out
Customers

EXIT

ready, they pick it up
from a window between
the kitchen and dining
room. (Assume that the
time it takes to place the
food in the window is
included in the meal
preparation time above.)

The gross profit from an
average eat-in customer
is $4 and from an
average take-out
customer $2.

a) Suppose that dinner time (5pm-9pm) is the peak time of the day. During ...