Week 6 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 6 — One Slow Step: A Print Center Finds Its Limit — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Business Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 6 of the term — find the bottleneck in a process, compute its capacity before and after adding equipment, and explain the idea to someone new to business.

This week you learned how a business makes what it sells: operations management, the kinds of production process, planning with a Gantt chart, the process map with its bottleneck and capacity, the approaches that build quality in, and the habits that protect a small business's information. In this assignment you find the slowest step in one process, compute how much it can produce before and after adding equipment, and explain the idea to someone who has never studied business. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Business Case Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The case is illustrative, built for this course and not real data. A neighborhood copy-and-print center makes large posters and banners for local groups. Every job passes through three steps in order, and each step handles one job at a time. Like the coffee cart in this week's chapter, the case has no named people.

The print center's steps, line by line:

Job intake at the counter: 5 minutes per job.
Printing on the center's one large-format printer: 15 minutes per job.
Trimming and packing: 3 minutes per job.

Work these two problems, showing every step of the arithmetic:

What is the print center's capacity, in jobs an hour, with its one printer?
The center adds a second, identical printer and a second operator, and the two printers share the printing work evenly. What is the print center's capacity, in jobs an hour, after the change?

Beside each answer, add a brief interpretation:

Problem 1: name the bottleneck and explain, using the terms bottleneck and capacity, why a faster intake counter would not let the center finish more jobs; then name at least two stakeholders who feel the limit and say how.
Problem 2: say which step is the bottleneck after the change and why; then name one quality approach from this week (total quality management, the Six Sigma steps, or lean production) that the center could use against jobs that have to be reprinted because the size was wrong, and one basic protection for the center's online ordering account, each tied to the case.

Explain it to a non-expert

A relative who runs a lunch truck asks you, "If I hire a faster cashier, will I serve more people?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains what a bottleneck is and what capacity means, answers the question in everyday words, and names one limit, including that the print-center case is illustrative and that capacity is a ceiling that assumes steady work, not a promise. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a library desk where laptops are checked out. Model answer: "Every process has one step that takes the longest, and that slowest step, called the bottleneck, decides how many people can get through in an hour. At the library desk, scanning a card is quick, but setting up each laptop takes the most time, so a faster card scanner would not help the line. The most the desk can handle in an hour is its capacity, and it only grows if the slowest step gets faster or gets help. Real days have rushes and slow moments, so capacity is a ceiling, not a guarantee."

Use that pattern for the lunch truck, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your work. A reader should be able to rebuild every amount you report from the print center's step times without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

the two answers, each with every step of the arithmetic shown and the interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to the relative, explaining a bottleneck and capacity, answering the question about a faster cashier, and naming one limit; and
a before-and-after comparison of the print center's three steps, listing the step times you used and naming the bottleneck each time, so your amounts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the print center's three steps before and after the change with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a free spreadsheet to lay out the print center's step times. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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