Twisted Oak, located in Central Texas, specializes in home decor. Distribution is operated out of a 100,000 square foot warehouse, which supplies four retail outlets and an on-line store. The on-line store ships orders all over the world. The on-line store's order fulfillment process consists of several steps: order receipt, preparation, picking, packing, and processing. The warehouse manager has identified the packing step as the order fulfillment process' bottleneck. That is, capacity for the entire order fulfillment process can never be greater than the packing operation's capacity.
The on-line store currently has enough demand to keep the packing process running non-stop during operating hours. The packing operation is organized into 32 packing stations. Each station is staffed with a single employee whose sole job is to package orders for shipment. Each packer, on average, is able to pack 11 orders per hour.
After orders are packed, the packages are moved to the processing station for shipment to the designated destination. At this station, employees check the packaged orders for packing quality, verify mailing labels, and sort orders by shipping carrier. On average, each employee at this station is able to process 110 packages per hour.
Required:
a. Given the current order fulfillment process, how many employees should the warehouse manager assign to the processing station to ensure that station can meet demand from the packing station?