Case Study: Since graduating from college, you and your best friend (Mina) have been thinking about starting a new business. Since you majored in business and your friend majored in art, and both of you discovered this hobby of making custom cards for inviting family and friends to special occasion, you decide to turn it to a business. You know that you should start with estimating your capacity to calculate your potential profit and to allocate your resources, especially your time.

When you came up with the most efficient way of doing this, you started timing each step.

Your working station is actually your dining table. Each evening after you both come home from your full time, you should clean the table which will take 14 minutes. Mina then has to start her computer which takes another 3 minutes.

Orders come to your email. It`ll take Mina 2 minutes in total to access each order. Mina then will initialize printing the cards with the customer chosen background. Printing each card takes 1 minute. After printing is done, you can begin calligraphy writing which on average will take 8 minutes per card and its envelope. The card and its envelope have to dry for 3 minutes before Mina can begin customer-specified decorations. The decoration step will take 2 minutes. Mina will then take 1 minute to stuff each card into the matching envelope. You will mail the invitation the next morning, on your way to your full-time job.

Questions:

• How many minutes does it take to complete the first invitation?
• What is the bottleneck of the process?
• How much of your and Mina`s individual time is needed per invitation?
• In a typical 4 hours span, how many invitations can you promise to complete?