Chapter 3

Question 1

process

Answer 1

a system of structured activities that use resources to change inputs (energy, material, information, labor, knowledge) into valuable outputs

Question 2

process thinking

Answer 2

a way of viewing activities in an organization as processes rather than as departments or functions

Question 3

juran’s law

Answer 3

a key premise of process thinking: 15% of operational problems are the result of human errors and the other 85% are due to systemic process errors

Question 4

operation (change)

Answer 4

an activity that changes an input

Question 5

transportation (move)

Answer 5

an activity that moves an input from one place to another without changing any of its other characteristics

Question 6

inspection (check)

Answer 6

an activity that checks or verifies the results of another activity

Question 7

delay (wait)

Answer 7

an unintentional stoppage of the flow of work

Question 8

storage (inventory/store)

Answer 8

an activity that intentionally stops flow of work items and places them under formal control

Question 9

process capabilities

Answer 9

the specific types of outputs and levels of performance that a process can generate

Question 10

capacity

Answer 10

the limit on the amount of output per period of time that a process can generate or store given a level of inputs and resources available

Question 11

maximum capacity

Answer 11

the highest level of output that a process can achieve under ideal conditions in the short term; also known as design capacity

Question 12

effective capacity

Answer 12

the level of capacity or output that the process can be expected to produce under normal conditions; what management plans for under normal conditions

Question 13

utilization

Answer 13

the percent of process capacity that is actually used

Question 14

yield rate

Answer 14

the percentage of units successfully produced as a percentage of inputs

Question 15

economies of scale

Answer 15

as production volumes increase with additions of capacity, the unit cost to produce a product decreases to an optimal level

Question 16

learning curve

Answer 16

as the production volume doubles, the labor hours required decrease by a constant proportion

Question 17

diseconomies of scale

Answer 17

occur when the cost per unit increases as an operation’s size increases

Question 18

theory of constraints

Answer 18

the overall management system that strives to improve system performance by identifying, focusing on, and managing constraints

Question 19

bottleneck

Answer 19

an activity or resource that limits or constrains the output of a process

Question 20

serial/sequential structure

Answer 20

a process structure there the activities occur one after the other in sequence

Question 21

parallel structure

Answer 21

a process where there are two or more resources doing the same task simultaneously

Question 22

little’s law

Answer 22

an empirically proven relationship that exists between flow time, inventory, and throughput

Question 23

flow time

Answer 23

the time it tkes one unit to get through a process

Question 24

cycle time

Answer 24

the time that it takes to process one unit at an operation in the overall process

Question 25

wait time

Answer 25

the amount of time that an item spends waiting

Question 26

metric

Answer 26

a measure, a standard, and a consequence that work together to close the gap between what i valued by the customer and what is intended by the organization

Question 27

kaizen event

Answer 27

a short term approach to enhancing efficient that focuses on improving an existing process or an activity within a process