This ten mark question tested throughput accounting. Part (a) was a 4 mark discussion question asking for a brief explanation of why the senior stylists’ time had been described as the ‘bottleneck activity’, with some supporting calculations.

The answers to this were generally weak and it was apparent that candidates do not really understand what a bottleneck activity is.

The majority of answers stated that this was the bottleneck activity because a senior stylist spends more time on each client than any of the other staff spend.

Whilst this is true, this fact alone would not necessarily make the senior stylists’ time the bottleneck resource. Candidates also needed to consider the total amount of senior stylists’ time available compared to the other staff, so they needed to take into account the number of each type of staff member that were available and base their explanation on this.

Future candidates should be sure to read through the suggested answer carefully. Note that the suggested answer only provides one approach to answering this question, however there were numerous approaches that could have been taken and credit was duly given where appropriate.