Department A Assembles widgets by hand. A new product line commenced last week. The first widget produced took 5 hours. The labor hours were fully utilized making 2000 widgets in the first week of production. No additional labor hours are available in short term. The department bases its learning curve calculations on the model: y=a.x^-0.23
Question: How many units were produced in the second week.
I am really confused over solving how to go ahead in calculating the units for the second after calculating the average time for the first week.
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Hi- Please post the answers & let me know what part you dont understand. This doesnt seem like a CIMA question where is it from?
Many Thanks
Cath
Hi, I apologise if I'm not supposed to answer as I'm not a tutor but I think I can help with this.
The learning curve formula gives y as the average time to make each of the x widgets so you can multiply it by x to get the total time to make x widgets.
yx= total time to make x widgets =a.x^-0.23.x
=a.x^(1-0.23)
=a.x^(0.77)
Now you have the total time worked in that first week to make those 2000 widgets and you're told that "The labor hours were fully utilized" and "No additional labor hours are available in short term" so you can assume that the same number of hours are worked in the second week.
If you put the total hours available in two weeks on the left of this new formula you can rearrange it to calculate x, the total widgets made in two weeks and then it's simple to work out how many of them were made in the second week.
Hi,
Actually this was a question Kaplan official study text. The the answer in it is little tricky and unable to understand.
Ok sorry - Ill have a look at it. The explanation above seems to cover it anyway :-)
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