Assignment task:
The raw material for a band-aid, a one-way elastic substrate that adheres to your skin, is called ETS. ETS arrives in large rolls at the band aid manfufacturer. One roll might produce 300,000 band aids. Glue is applied to one side of the ETS substrate (otherwise, it wouldn't stick to you!) by a gluing machine. The glued ETS is then heated to 50 degrees Celsius to puff it up to create holes in the glue coating. After heating, the raw material is cut and rolled-up into 300 meter lengths, the widths varies depending on the bandage size. The rolls are taken away and stacked, where they wait for the next step. Meanwhile the soft, cushioned pad fabrid, intended to cover the wound, also has to be cut into strips, which are also stacked to wait for the next step. At this point, both the glued ETS and the cushioned pads are assembled by a single machine into individual band-aids. Next, two platic protectors are put over the two glue covered ends of the band aid. Each individual band aid is then picked up by a robot arm's suction tip and placed between two continuous sheets of wrapping paper. The wrapping paper, with bandages inside, is cut up into individual packets by a cutting machine. Finally, the packages are sterilized in lots of 100,000. After sterilization, the packets are placed into individual boxes for sale. The size and composition of the boxes is determined by customer requirements. The production manager, Thomas Pflaster, is concerned that his process scheduling is not as good as it could be and thinks that possibly the first step he should take is to diagram the production flow and the information flow for the process.
1. Draw a process flow diagram for the manufacturing process.