Assignment Questions:

1. Did you have a strategy to follow in order to maximize profits?
       a. If not, should you have?  What would it have been and why?
       b. If you did, what was your initial strategy and why did you decide on that particular strategy?
2. After you ran the exercise/simulation once, did your strategy change?  Why or why not?  How?
3. What is "the goal"?  How does it apply in this situation?  Be specific and relate this to The Goal.
4. What are the 5 steps of TOC?  How did you/would you implement each of the 5 steps in this simulation?
5. As a production manager who has read The Goal and implemented the 5 steps, where would you go from here?
6. Calculate what you believe is the maximum amount of profit that could be obtained in the exercise/simulation.  Note:  this is a linear programming problem and Excel solver can be used to find the maximum amount of profit, but you do not need the solver if you don't want to use it.  (Show your calculations or include your Excel file.)
7. The exercise/simulation is deterministic, in other words the production times are all fixed and unvarying.  In real life this would not be the case.  If production time at each machine for every unit varied, but the average production time at each machine was the same as it is in the simulation, how would that affect production and profits?