C006 SRPING 21 Operations Management

Assignment 1

Due date: June 11 at 8.15AM

1. Consulting company [50 points]

A small one-person consulting firm receives consulting projects mainly from

telecom operators and call center operators, due to her own past experience
and contacts in these sectors. She can complete a consulting project in three
months on average, once work on the project is started. The consultant is busy
75% of the time and has an average backlog of four projects waiting to be
started.

1.1 At what rate on average are projects arriving to the consulting form? [20
points]

1.2 How long would the average consulting project need to wait to be started
[20 points]

1.3 The consultant is unable to influence the pattern of arrivals of consulting

projects to her firm and she is also unable to speed up the time it takes her to
complete a project. Use waiting line analysis arguments to suggest how she
can reduce the time that projects spend waiting before she starts to work on
them. [10 points]

2. Call center [50 points]

An internet provider call centre in Glasgow, Scotland has six operators. The
operators have been divided into three groups of two each, with the first pair
responsible for calls originating from England, the second pair responsible for
calls originating from Scotland and the third pair responsible for calls
originating from Wales. Each incoming call is handled by one operator. Calls
from each country arrive at a rate of 16 per hour (this inter-arrival time is
subject to unpredictable variability with a coefficient of variation equal to 1).
Each call centre operator takes on average 6 minutes to handle a
call. However, this activity time is subject to unpredictable variability with a
coefficient of variation of 1.
2.1 What is the average length of queue of calls waiting to be served by an
operator in this setup? [20 points]

2.2 What would the average length of queue of calls be if they decided that
an incoming call from any country could be served by an operator in any of
the three pairs? [20 points]

2.3 Explain qualitatively why you would expect to see the increase or
reduction in length of queue. [10 points]