After a hectic but fun year at UCD, you ditched a career in consulting to become the MD of the Sugar plant: Operation Management Case Study, SMU, Singapore

After a hectic but fun year at UCD, you ditched a career in consulting to become the MD of the Sugar plant. You are looking forward to applying your extensive knowledge of Operations principles to this plant.

On your first visit to the sugar-producing facility, you learn the following. Sugar production has basically three steps: Purification of Molasses, followed by Superheating of the purified molasses, and finally Crystallization. The facility has three extremely reliable continuous processing machines for the three process steps.

To ensure the freshness of sugar, at no point in the process, can one build work in process inventories. The performance of the individual processing machines is described below.