Complete the questions in the description
Question 1
Caldecotte Ltd has been producing and supplying specialised parts and components to vehicle manufacturers for over 60 years. With demands for electric cars on the rise, Caldecotte Ltd has been struggling to meet the demand for components for electric cars. The production manager wants to ensure that these components are produced as efficiently as possible.
Division Y is responsible for producing components related to electric cars. This division produces three primary components as follows: Electric Energy Storage (EE), Ultracapacitors (UC) and Battery Modules (BM).
A bottleneck has emerged in the use of the machines that produces these components. All three components require three stages of manufacturing as follows: a machine that assembles various parts, which are then filled with the necessary fluid and tested, and finally packaged. Mr Shaw therefore wishes to adopt throughput accounting in decision-making to optimise the use of bottleneck resources.
The information below has been supplied:
Machine Hours available
Hours per unit
EE
Hours per unit
UC
Hours per unit
BM
Assembly (A) 2,500,000 7 5 6
Testing (T) 2,500,000 7 4 4
Packaging (P) 800,000 2 1 2
EE UC BM
Recorded sales demand in units 170,000 150,000 130,000
Total factory costs are £5,000,000.
EE
£ per unit
UC
£ per unit
BM
£ per unit
Sales 32 24 25
Material costs 11 14 10
a.Calculate the utilisation rates and identify the bottleneck. Calculate the throughput accounting ratios and recommend the optimal level of production for each component.
b.Analyse the results suggesting suitable actions which the production manager should take in the short and long run.
