Bottlenecks and batching in dragon fruit jam production

GSH Conserves was an artisanal jam producer in Singapore that specialised in using tropical fruits, such as dragon fruit, lychee, mango, etc., to handcraft high-quality jam in small batches. Founded in 2013 in a home kitchen, the demand for GSH Conserves jam and bottled fruits had grown organically...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: WEE, Kwan Eng, CHEAH, Sin Mei
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cases_coll_all/347
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:GSH Conserves was an artisanal jam producer in Singapore that specialised in using tropical fruits, such as dragon fruit, lychee, mango, etc., to handcraft high-quality jam in small batches. Founded in 2013 in a home kitchen, the demand for GSH Conserves jam and bottled fruits had grown organically through word-of-mouth over the years. In 2016, GSH Conserves moved to a new factory that could cater to a larger production capacity in order to meet growing demand. However, Edwin Lim, a partner at GSH Conserves, observed that his workers and equipment were often idle. He had to examine the company’s current operations, identify inefficiencies and suggest improvements. How would the increase in demand and production batch sizes affect production capacity? Would adding resources help to eliminate bottlenecks? How can he redesign the production process to enhance efficiency without affecting product quality? This case is developed to provide a simple operational example of how demand patterns shift the bottleneck in production lines. Key aspects of this case are the inclusion of multiple flow units in a process, and the impact of batch sizing on resource capacity in processes with fixed setup times.