7 QUESTION 3 Consider the processing plant of a large cranberry cooperative. The plant receives 1,500 barrels of cranberries each hour, 70% of which are wet- harvested berries and 30% are dry -harvested berries. At the plant, dry -harvested and wet- harvested berries are processed differently. All berries are received at a central receiving station. The station has five docks where trucks unload the berries. It takes about 8 minutes to unload one truck. The average truck has about 75 barrels of berries on it. After the receiving station, dry berries are moved to destoning. Wet berries do not have to be destoned. There are three machines at destoning, each of which can process 1500 barrels per hour. Next comes dechaffing, a step that needs to be completed for both dry -harvested and wet -harvested berries. There are three dechaffing machines, each of which can process 1,500 barrels per hour. After dechaffing, the wet- harvested berries move on to the dryer. The dryer can process 600 barrels per hour. Dry -harvested berries do not have to be processed at the dryer. Finally, all berries need to move through the separator. The separator can handle 1,200 barrels per hour. W here in the process is the bottleneck? The ke y difficulty in this question lies in the fact that dry- harve st ed berries and wet- harve sted berries use some of the same resources in the process, but don’t follow exactly the same flow. In othe r wo rds, some resources only process dry- harvest ed berries (the destoning machines), some process only wet- harve sted berries (the dryer), and some process both (the receiving st atio n and the separator). Further, the capacity calc ulation at the receiving station is not trivial as one needs to real ize t hat th ere are five docks, each dock can handle 60/8 truc ks p er hour, an d th at t here are 75 barrels to a truck. However, given how well Chat GPT performed on the first question, t his should be straight forward . Or maybe not? T here is only one way to find out.