throughput

Example 3
Yam Co is involved in the processing of sheet metal into products A, B and C using three processes,
pressing, stretching and rolling.
The factory has 50 production lines each of which contain the three processes: Raw material for the
sheet metal is first pressed then stretched and finally rolled. The processing capacity varies for each
process and the factory manager has provided the following data:
Processing time per metre in hours
Product A Product B Product C
Pressing 0.50 0.50 0.40
Stretching 0.25 0.40 0.25
Rolling 0.40 0.25 0.25
The factory operates for 225,000 hours.
Identify the bottleneck process and explain why this process is described as a ‘bottleneck’.