CBAP · Question #447
A major manufacturer of popular beverages has appointed a local distributor to serve a specific territory. The demand for the beverages has a pronounced seasonal pattern. The distributor performs…
The correct answer is B. 20 hours. To scale daily delivery capacity from 60 tons to 100 tons using the same fleet, the trucks must extend their daily operating hours proportionally. Applying the 100/60 ratio to a 12-hour baseline operational day yields 20 hours.
Question
A major manufacturer of popular beverages has appointed a local distributor to serve a specific territory. The demand for the beverages has a pronounced seasonal pattern. The distributor performs well overall, but is repeatedly unable to keep up with fulfilling many customer orders during peak demand periods. The distributor's current delivery capability is stretched to deliver 60 tons of merchandise per day whereas the season's peak demand periods need a daily delivery capability of up to 100 tons. The distributor is under pressure to fully meet the year-round market demand in order to stay in business. The distributor's management wants to identify and consider more cost-effective options as resorting to adding more trucks and drivers would not be economically feasible. A business analyst (BA) has spent several days observing and measuring the warehouse activities to understand the situation and to gain insights into possible solutions. The delivery workflow is a four- step process: (1) picking the orders and assembling them on trays, (2) bringing the trays to the loading bay, (3) loading the orders into trucks, and (4) delivering the orders to customers. As the following table illustrates, overall performance depends is dependent on five major resources:
(1) the workers who pick the orders and load them into trucks, (2) the tallyers who check the orders, (3) the drivers, (4) the trucks, and (5) eight loading bays (LBs). Each truck can only make two trips a day. The BA has noticed that only 30% of trips have their orders available for loading when a truck arrives. Otherwise the truck has to wait one extra hour until the orders are picked and brought to the loading bay. If trucks are the only constraint, approximately how many hours are lost due to this downtime?
Options
- A18 hours
- B20 hours
- C15 hours
- D17 hours
How the community answered
(42 responses)- A10% (4)
- B86% (36)
- C2% (1)
- D2% (1)
Why each option
To scale daily delivery capacity from 60 tons to 100 tons using the same fleet, the trucks must extend their daily operating hours proportionally. Applying the 100/60 ratio to a 12-hour baseline operational day yields 20 hours.
18 hours does not satisfy the 100/60 scaling ratio applied to the 12-hour baseline - the correct product is 20, not 18.
The current 60-ton capacity is achieved within a baseline operating window, and reaching 100 tons requires scaling that window by a factor of 100/60 (approximately 1.67x). Applying this multiplier to a 12-hour baseline gives exactly 20 daily operating hours - the minimum schedule needed to close the 40-ton peak demand gap without adding vehicles or drivers.
15 hours falls below the current implied baseline and would reduce rather than increase delivery throughput.
17 hours does not result from any valid mathematical relationship between the 60-ton current capacity and the 100-ton peak requirement.
Concept tested: Operational capacity scaling and hours calculation
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