Furniture Face Lift refinishes old wood furniture. Their process for refinishing chairs has eight workers and four
stations. Each chair starts at the stripping station, then goes to priming, then to painting, and finally to inspection. Where
there are multiple workers within a station, each worker works independently on his/her own chair. Assume inventory
buffers are allowed between each station and each station has inventory to work on at the beginning of the day.
Station Staffing Processing Time
(hours per chair per
worker)
Stripping 3 2.5
Priming 2 1.5
Painting 2 1.75
Inspection 1 0.8
a. What is the maximum number of chairs per hour that can be produced?
b. Suppose now that each worker is trained to do all tasks and each worker works on a chair from start to finish; i.e.,
each worker does stripping, priming, painting, and inspection. What is the maximum capacity of the process in
chairs per hour?