At 00:35 30/08/99 -0400, you wrote:
>>
>> >The game here is to get the machine running 24 hours.
>>
>> This is the bit, in 24 hours a plant will make 20000 units! (Do you think
>> that they would stop a plant for a run of 10% of a days capacity? (Not I))
>>
>I think their point is that the place is MANNED 24 hours a day, so for the
>machines to be idle at all is a waste of money.
>
>Idle machines with workers sitting nearby doesn't make anyone money.
>
>
>tony
>
>

That would be a suprise indeed. I think that you have you don't have a full
appreciation of the cost of a manufacturing plant or the nominal operation.
Take this as an example a small plant that produced 2000000 line items per
year will set you back around $5000000 (New equipment etc)

Ok now assume that the interset cost is 5% and the depreciation value is
20%, thus the manufacturer would loose 25% of the equipment value per year
(OK so it can be written off in tax but it is still a considerable loss),
thus just to keep the plant value at $5000000, a further $1250000 must be
gained out of proffit (Before abnormals),  (This assumes that the money is
going to be placed back into the plant for upgrade costs), if this is so,
then each item passed through the plant has an inhrrent $0.62 cents just to
cover the plant (This is often why old equipment is used on long term
production runs, it makes money sense!)

The number of people to run it "4" say at $50000 per year (Very highly paid
z rail loaders :)) = $200000 or 5% of the cost of the equipment alone!,
note that also most equipment will page you if it has a problem so the
number of workers is quite small. So it is not having workers doing
nothing, but having machines doing nothing that is important, maned or not!

It can be seen that equipment costs are $6250000 and workers are $200000 or
3.2% of the plant costs. Now to look at this in a time scale, the plant
cost per second per year is $0.198 (Including all capital). For running
costs only ($1250000) = $0.039 per second. So at this point (Using the
latter figures) you can see that the plant cost is $142 per hour!.

Having the plant idle while a new run is loaded (Including programming of
the machines and testing of the run start) takes around 2 hours (Very short
and assumes that the run has been inprogress before). On the 2000 board per
month as the original poster was looking for this will add $284 each time
(A very generous production plant) or $0.14 per board. Now if the plant
makes 5800 per day, then in this day the plant is down for 4 hours to do
this other run. This corresponds to money that the manufacuturer has to
regain.

The other poster was correct in that time is money and production plant
proffits are trimmed to the bone, but that is for constant runs of 100000
items or more. Infact you will find that some manufacturers will not look
at you unless you talk runs of 1000000+++
Not for the people cost, but the plant cost

Dennis