On the first day we bought a machine at station 1 because we felt that the utilisation rates were too high. Also the queue sizes for station one reach high levels like 169 and above. Hence we felt that station 1 was at a bottleneck and we made a purchase there. Also many other teams seemed to have done the same. However, after several days of observation, we realised that the demand fluctuated and dropped significantly, hence underutilising our machines at station 1. Also we missed out on the interest we could have earned if we did not buy the machine.
It was a hard choice to make because we do not wish to miss out on under-delivering our goods which would result in more losses. For our first step perhaps we made a wrong judgement and were too quick to purchase a machine like most of the other teams. One evaluation is that while we were unable to predict the future demand trends from day 50 to day 150, perhaps one thing we could have done is to wait and observe the demand over a short period before making a decision to buy the machine.
